The 8th step Rebirth, Storyteller's Log 1-20-2013

It's still winter but in Southern California, where I am right now, the weather feels like spring is here. So it's time to continue to our next step...

Here's the overview of where our character has gone swinging between hope and fear over time. And we've been in the roller coaster seat right along with them. This is the very big picture with the smaller bumps smoothed out. Along the way there's been lots of smaller glimpses of hope and reasons for fear. We'll explore those after we finish the big picture.

Many of these items may "sound" familiar. And they should, it's all of the items that I've learned from the plot point theories that have helped me understand the writing process. Only now, for the first time, I can "see" how they all fit together to guide me. In the next graph, you can see where the act breaks fall, indicated by vertical lines.

Being able to see it has also allowed new insights to emerge that couldn't be "seen" before. In fact, as I did this graph this morning, I noticed something new. I wanted to visually point out where the turning point are where hope turns to fear, or vice versa, and I realized they reminded me of a stop light.

First, we have the warning of the lesson. It's a yellow light.  What does it mean when you see a yellow light?

POP MINI QUIZ:

What does it mean when you see a yellow light?

a. Stop

b. Slow down

c. Speed up

d. Turn around

e. All of the above

The answer from the drivers manual is, of course, (b) slow down. But what do drivers do when they see a yellow light? They speed up to make it through the light. Isn't that like ignoring the lesson. The psychology behind this structure is amazing.

When the character thinks they've achieved their goal, they have to stop. They reach the red light. It's in the silence that they realize their goal was empty and they face the consequences.

Then they symbolically die. Doesn't it seem like red lights last forever? Maybe red lights were invented to give us moments to look at our lives. Think about it next time your'e waiting for a red light.

Our next step in the big picture of mapping our story structure is for death to somehow be turned around. After all, our character is not really dead, only symbolically. I, being visually oriented, would add in the imaginary too. Film is a visual medium. Even novels are describing the world visually. The character has died symbolically and imaginarily. We need to show it to the audience so they can feel it. I covered this in my first book, Directing the Story.

So what turns the situation around for the character? Is there anything in our story to give us a clue? We're weaving a story together here and the item, I'm thinking about, has already returned once. It's the lesson. The lesson returned around the red light showing the consequences of ignoring the lesson. Now, the character has grown from painful experience and is now ready to hear the lesson. They have realized their way of doing things has not worked. It's been a painful death of the old ways. The lesson returns. It has traveled the path of the lights, from yellow to red to green. Easy way to remember it just like a real stop light- yellow, red, green.

Now they learn the lesson and they are reborn. What does this mean? In the great cycle of birth and death comes rebirth. Spring is here.

The rebirth is a change in perspective like seeing something you couldn't see before. That's exactly why the character ignored the lesson. They couldn't see it or weren't ready to hear it. We're talking about a paradigm shift. It reminds me of a story...

There was once a bunch of ants walking along on a giant flat field gathering food. Over time the food seemed to be diminishing. But they keep walking ahead. One day the food was all gone. At that point a butterfly arrived. They asked the butterfly if had seen any food. He told them that he had been watching them and was puzzled why they keep walking around the Mobieus strip they were on. He saw that they had looped around eating the food until there was none left. Told them this and explained that a Mobieus strip is a loop of paper with a single twist in it that makes the paper have only one side. What did the ants do? Well, they thought the butterfly was absolutely crazy. He wasn't making any sense. So they ate him.

What's the point of this story? Well, the ants could only see things from their perspective. Their "reality" was the images they saw and the symbols they used to represent their experience. They only knew they were walking on a flat surface. The butterfly's experience of "reality" was different because he could fly around in multiple dimensions. He had a different paradigm.

There's one more point to this story. This one is about the real. The ants ate the butterfly. Did they eat him because he was food or because he was blowing their minds? People don't like to have their worlds shattered. Thats what happens when a paradigm shifts. Trees that don't bend in the wind break.

Two blog posts back, I presented a quiz. If the character's life unravels, what does that do to the story weaving. And secondly, if the character dies, is that the end of this blog. 

At first I was puzzled by this apparent contradiction. Then I remembered Gregory Bateson, in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind, faced the same problem. The solution came when he realized that these are two different levels of abstraction, or logical types as he called them. When we separate them the problem goes away. 

(Level 1 ( Level 2 ( Level 3)))

The story should be woven tightly. The character should unravel. Which is it? They're not on the same level. The first is the structure of the story. The second is an event in the story. Level 1 Story (Level 2 character unraveling)   

But the second question adds even another level.

The blog is about characters going through the events of a story. The character dying is a story event within the blog. 

{ Level 1Blog [Level 2 Story structure (Level 3 character dying)]}

The larger structure contains the smaller fiction. Before I figured this out, I confused them to being on the same level. The deadlock that presented itself was a kind of "dead"lock. The new information allowed a greater perspective on the problem that I hadn't seen before. Just like in our story structure, my old idea died and was replaced by an idea with a more complex structure.

Gregory Bateson showed how these logical type confusions could result in double binds. This is communication structure in which any choice you make is wrong. "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't," as they say. 

However, Bateson also discovered that something else could happen. They were studying dolphin learning and found they could teach the dolphins to learn that if they did a trick they could get a fish. They wanted to know if the dolphins could (learn (how to learn)). So they decided to only give the dolphins a fish ONLY if they did a NEW trick. The dolphins came out and did their tricks but no fish. The dolphins got annoyed. However, after a short while they did a new trick and got a fish. It was amazing the dolphins did 15 new tricks that no one had ever seen before!

Communication paradoxes can result in pathology or creativity. 

That is the power of structure. Aren't you glad you can see it now? Stay tuned, it's a whole new world, there are more, never seen before, tricks coming...

The second step in mapping a story. Storyteller's Log 1-9-2013

We start by introducing a problem into our imaginary world of characters. This problem leads to our character taking acting and starting the story. 

This could be the infamous "inciting incident"? Doesn't the inciting incident just mean that it starts the story in motion? After you start your story, an inciting incident doesn't help you write any more. Does it? It's served its job as a signpost.

Therefore, "the inciting incident" doesn't help with one of my final puzzle pieces. It doesn't lead to causality. Now if there's a problem, that problem acts as a CAUSE which leads to the EFFECT. The character takes action to start to solve it in direct respond to the cause.

Stories are different than life for this very reason. Events in life have so many causes and effects that it can become so complex that you can't understand it. Stories allow us to see how things are connected in life, in a very simplified way of course.

The other side of a problem is that the character wants something. It might be that they just want to get rid of the problem, but usually they want something more. The problem might be getting in their way of what they want.

{Meta note: I don't feel this is very clear yet. I'm exploring this subject and I don't have all the answers yet. However, so far, it has proven extremely fruitful so far so I'm following my hunches. The following are more areas about "problems and wants" that I hope will allow me to penetrate the secrets of what characters want and how to use that information during the writing process.}

If you had three wishes, what would you wish for?

(Development artwork from Disney's Aladdin)

There's a problem with characters wanting something. Believe it or not, most people do not know what they want. Ask your friends what they want. Most of then will tell you what they don't want. Try it. Do you know what you want? Write it down. Now examine it carefully to see if it's really disguising what you don't want. It could be covering a fear. "I want to be employed." might be covering a fear of being unemployed. Compare that to, "I want to storyboard on great movies!" That is positive and specific.

Acting out of fear is not a place of power. (This is something that you can use in developing your characters.)

Now the classic hero's journey says that we meet a mentor. So what? I don't think that is the key point. What's more important is that our character, that we identify with, is offered a lesson. Don't focus on the mentor. Focus on the message. It can be abstract or literal, covert or overt, on the nose or cryptic like a zen koan. It can even be nonsense that hides greater truths. This lesson can come from any character or even a fortune cookie. Or like in LA Stories, it could be the billboard that speaks to Steve Martin. If you want a mentor that's fine, but it's the lesson that the character needs to hear.

And what happens, as in all good stories, irony rules supreme and the character ignore the lesson. You get to invent why they ignore the lesson, and the reason should come out of character. They might be too proud to accept help or they might be a know-it-all who really doesn't. It's up to you and your imagination.

Create your lesson for the character very carefully. We're setting it up for later use. Remember we're weaving strands of causality together. I am being LITERAL here not METAPHORIC when I speak of story weaving.

Let's look at what's happened on our chart. So far we have mapped a character who encounter a problem and things start to look bad. We're dipping into the -Y axis. We become afraid for the character. But when the lesson is offered we start to go back up to 0 or neutral.

During this time the character, and vicariously we the audience, need to SEE what can happen if the character fails and what could happen if they succeed. This shows how high they can go or how far they can fall. This helps us invest in the story and really root for our characters. It gives the story a meaningful resonance.

In the next blog, we'll see what happens in our story when the character sets out to solve their problem and achieve their goal. Here's a sneak preview. In this illustration, Iggy has decided he wants to make it big in Hollywood so he sets out to achieve his fame and glory. (Illustration from Iggy's Incredibly Easy Way to Write a Story, the primer on this subject.)

Before I go, I left a previous question unanswered. I asked how I could see the structure when no other writer could. (Remember, stories present a hierarchy of narrative questions, which need to be answered in order to move on to next bigger question.) I told you the answer was in the sentence itself. I could "see" it.

Why could I see it? When I grew up, I had a difficult time with language. I still vividly remember struggling to tell the difference between "the" and "then". So for a multitude of reasons, I turned to art and became a very visually oriented person. Language was second for me. What's ironic about this, is now I've written three books, and am writing a blog. Actually, I'm writing/drawing a blog.

The second reason was that when I was in a college painting class, I suffered painter's block. My professor suggested that I read Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Now this 300 plus page book was a real challenge for me, particularly because every page had new words like schizogenesis and duero-learning. I kept at it until I finished and in retrospect, this book taught me how to think. I wish I could remember the name of my professor to thank him. The book changed my life.

You might be wondering what it was about. It began with what Bateson called metalogues. These were conversations with his daughter, conversations of a very special sort.

According to Wikipedia,
DEFINITION: A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject. This conversation should be such that not only do the participants discuss the problem but the structure of the conversation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject. 
Notably, the history of evolutionary theory is inevitably a metalogue between man and nature, in which the creation and interaction of ideas must necessarily exemplify evolutionary process.

The book covered a cornucopia of subjects including style and grace in primitive art, dolphin play, a double bind theory of schizophrenia, logical categories of communication, cybernetics, a theory of play and fantasy, duero-learning and criteria of mind. But what was absolutely amazing what that it all fit together just like his metalogues. He had taught me about "the patterns that connect." He had taught me about structural awareness. It blew my mind.

I cannot recommend this highly enough. However, it is not for the faint of heart. It will blow your mind, in a good way. 

Steps to an Ecology of MInd

So armed with my background of being visual, with a strong structural awareness and over 30 years of studying story, I saw it. And now, as we journey through these blogposts, you will too.