Story Crisis, Story Climax 2: What Story Arc in Film Can Teach Novelists

PART ONE

Why Movies?

I encourage you to approach movies as a master’s class in writing. Narrative films can provide a useful training in all of the elements that go into creating a finished novel. With experience you can easily recognize a film’s plot pressure points: the Inciting Incident, Turning Points 1 and 2, the First Culmination (Midpoint), and the Crisis Decision. Seeing a series of movies you can get a sense of how, for example, an Inciting Incident problem appears in the life of the protagonist (early in Act 1), how it jolts him (or her) out of his familiar world, and challenges what he values and desires. It demands a decision. Close observation will teach you how a story is made up of such critical plot pressure points.

Consider how we learn a complex martial arts maneuver, how a series of movements enter muscle memory. Watching a series of Inciting Incident scenes from several movies can bring into our emotional memory such a scene’s unique register of suddenness, tempo, and conflict. You can experience, compare, and internalize multiple plot pressure point scenes of one type (i.e. Inciting Incident) from many movies across several genres. You will soon come to know what is needed to make any specific kind of scene work.

Movies have a laser-like intensity on such plot pressure points. They must communicate a certain plot item quickly and decisively, and when necessary move their audience emotionally. It is useful to know what is required and when. Conflict, for example, should be approached like a story collision. The Inciting Incident disrupts the customary, pleasant routine of the protagonist’s world, something collides with that. How does the writer do this? You establish in the story’s early action several elements of the hero’s life and world which represent the attitude, values, and desires in the rest of his life. The Inciting Incident problem that emerges would challenge those elements in a basic way. Then his decision would reflect his personality, and attempt to respond to this upset. Much more on this to come.

With a close study of movie structure your story planning and writing will become sharper, clearer, more powerful, and evoke emotions more reliably. At a minimum your story’s plot pressure points will become stronger, which will lift the rest of your novel.

Why should you believe what I have to say on this? For years I simply enjoyed stories, it never occurred to me how much fun I could have creating them. Story in all its forms has been the passion and obsession of my life. As of this writing, I have written and published two novels, one novella, and two non-fiction titles. Even my PhD Dissertation was a speculation on how story affects subjective identity, how it shapes who we become.

Most writers will tell you they keep writing even when the prospect of ever having readers seems remote. Yet they keep plugging away. Why? I believe writers write for themselves, primarily. I write simply to get deeper access to this mystery of my own consciousness. It’s that simple. I agree with law of attraction discourse, as presented in The Secret and elsewhere, that consciousness is what brings this objective world around us into existence. If thinking creates being, then creating story worlds is an utterly magical thing to do.

The Best Tool

What is the single most effective thing you can do to supercharge your storytelling process? It was something I happened on accidentally when I wrote my first novel, way back in 2008. I’ve always been something of a planning nerd – habitually mapping out in meticulous detail the steps for any project. So it seemed a natural thing for me to create a planned stairway of scenes for that first novel. It was my good fortune to stumble on the one thing that virtually guarantees a writer will finish his or her book.

For me a plan remains an absolutely critical part of writing. Here’s what I did. I joined together three poster-sized blank financial charts, and drew a long diagonal line, with steps, from the lower left to the upper right. I wrote in scene ideas for the beginning and closing sections, and very slowly filled all the other steps, one per scene. The best way of doing this, as I’ll explain later, is to work out the story’s five problems, which crop up in the five plot pressure points (Inciting Incident, Turning Point 1, Midpoint, Turning Point 2, and Crisis Problem). It took more than a month to complete the full stairway of 137 steps.

I can’t describe how magnificent it felt to have a map of the decisions, actions, and outcomes – the events – that would unfold in my story. I now swear by this process. The book that best explains this approach, in an excellent, fun, encouraging way, is Randy Ingermanson’s How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method.

The Problem/Decision Arc

How do we get from here to there? How do you plan 100+ scenes for your story? Your scenes are really just the story’s events. Each event is defined as a character’s goal, the actions he takes, the obstacles (or conflicts) he encounters, and the change that results. That is how Robert McKee defines a scene – goal, obstacles, and change. Thus for each of the scenes on your scene list (scene stairway) write down those three items on a separate card as a scene description. It’s only three or four lines. Think of it like a scene logline in a movie screenplay – INT. ANNA’S APARTMENT. DAY – except it’s a line in point form for the main character’s goal, a line for each obstacle that comes along to block him, and a line for the outcome, or how it ends up.

The key to figuring out such an extensive list of scenes is working with your story’s problems: the problem/decision arc. Before dealing with this first consider what your hero’s world is like. Your story’s early action (before the Inciting Incident) will depict establishing events to clearly lay out that world: the hero’s life, job, circumstances, preferences, desires, and values. Pick out several abstract elements of that which best express this world. In Fury such elements would be: 1) Staff Sergeant Collier sees his tank as ‘home’, 2) the crew of misfits is a kind of family, 3) everyone has a job to do, and doing your job is paramount, 4) every mission is a ‘job’ that cannot be shirked, 5) the tank platoon is their community. In The Hundred-Foot Journey it could be: 1) the cohesive Kadam family itself, 2) Mrs. Kadam’s legacy of intense sensory-based Indian cooking, 3) Hassan’s eagerness to cook professionally and introduce others to her legacy. In Man of Steel it might be: 1) Superman not knowing where he is from, or how he came to have his powers, 2) being the ultimate orphan, someone who lost his family, race, and home world, 3) his intense desire to be accepted by those around him. In 12 Years A Slave the elements would be: 1) Solomon’s personal freedom, 2) his bond with his family and friends; 3) his success in his work, and 4) his education and contact with books.

The Inciting Incident problem will be an establishing problem, an adverse event that establishes how the protagonist’s world has been upset in a fundamental way. That first problem violates some or all of the early action elements discussed above. In Fury the Inciting Incident problem is Ellison cannot bring himself to shoot the enemy from his tank gunner’s position. This problem violates said elements because he’s literally not doing his job; he’s letting down Collier’s crew, their family; and he’s jeopardizing the platoon. Collier must respond to this problem, or worse will befall them. In The Hundred-Foot Journey this first problem is the Kadam family restaurant in Mumbai is attacked and firebombed after a local election. The elements that this attack violates are: Papa Kadam’s family; Mrs. Kadam’s unique cooking vanishes with her death and the restaurant’s destruction; and it emotionally scarred Hassan who had a special bond with his mother. In Man of Steel the Inciting Incident problem is Superman being taken aside and cautioned by his foster-father that residents of Earth will never accept him because of his special powers – they will always fear and reject what they can’t understand. This comes after two flashback scenes showing him helping people (a school bus full of children, and a rig worker on an oil rig). This problem, recalling his father’s words of permanent rejection, violates his desire to be accepted, it reminds him of being an orphan, of not knowing who he is or where he’s from or how he got his powers. In 12 Years A Slave the opening problem is Solomon waking up literally in chains to learn he’s been sold into slavery. This fact breaches all the elements of his world: he no longer has contact with his family, his working skills will not be used, he loses contact with former friends, and his life of books and ideas has also ended. His world is gone from him.

In each movie this establishing problem (Inciting Incident) leads to an emphatic decision. In Fury it leads to Collier physically forcing Ellison to shoot a prisoner. Collier literally holds the pistol in Ellison’s hand and forces him to watch as Collier pulls Ellison’s finger on the trigger. This was Collier’s way to break through Ellison’s natural resistance. In The Hundred-Foot Journey Papa Kadam decides that he and his family will emigrate to safety in Europe. In Man of Steel Superman still utterly accepts his father’s warning, years later as an adult, that people on Earth can never accept him as he really is. He feels he must hide his true identity. In 12 Years A Slave after first waking up Solomon has multiple flashbacks reliving his former life and the day of his abduction. In his next decision (after the TP1 problem of hearing Eliza mourning her lost children) he swears to do whatever it takes to survive, and somehow regain his freedom. The problem and decision together form the Inciting Incident, which launches the story action. What happens before the Inciting Incident establishes the hero’s world, but apart from that it is virtually a prologue.

There will be three more problems emerge before the Act 3 Crisis Climax. Back in Act 1, long after the Inciting Incident a new problem will arise, the Turning Point 1 (TP1) problem which pivots the story into Act 2A. Towards the end of Act 2A another problem arises, bringing about the story’s Midpoint, and which pivots the story into Act 2B. Then later another problem arises, defining the end of Act 2B, and launches the story into Act 3. As with the Inciting Incident problem, each of these three new problems leads to a decision. And as before, each new problem violates one or more of the abstract elements introduced in the early action.

In Fury the next problem at TP1 shows two US infantrymen killed in town in the next battle, two men who would have survived if Ellison had done his job. He watched the men die, and intensely feels their deaths. His inaction betrayed the crew, the platoon, and Collier. Ellison then sees a basement-level sniper in another building getting ready to shoot, and he curses the enemy and starts shooting. The next problem is at the Midpoint, following the festive breakfast with the two German women. The women’s building is hit by enemy shelling and destroyed, Anna is killed, and Ellison goes into shock. Ellison and Collier had a few moments of human contact with the women, and their ‘family’ briefly expanded to include them, but then it’s swept away. It leads Brady, a crewmember who taunted Ellison earlier, to hold Ellison and help him stagger back home, to the tank. The next problem is at TP2: a field engagement where the three other tanks in their platoon are destroyed. Their platoon, their community, is taken away. It leads Collier to decide to continue with their mission, although one tank alone will likely not succeed. In the other movies these three new problems challenge in a similar fashion important elements of the hero’s world.

To review, the Inciting Incident problem establishes a basic, profound challenge to the hero’s world and life. The three subsequent problems challenge one or more of the elements that define why the hero values that world. The decision that is made following each problem is whatever the plot requires to carry events forward, eventually, to the next problem. Moreover, the next and final problem, the Crisis Problem, will challenge the hero’s world in the most profound way yet.

Ideally the Crisis Problem challenges all of the elements of the protagonist’s world, in an unexpected way. For example the event itself may be positive for the hero in some way. This works well because the TP2 problem/decision occurred not long before, so a different way of making this ‘worse’ for the hero is preferred. This last problem might be positive – by offering the protagonist a choice, for example. In contemporary Western culture having a choice is usually considered a positive, which is not the case in other cultures, or other time periods in our own history. In Fury the final problem is a large German column is approaching the intersection where Collier’s tank is stopped, damaged. He has the choice whether to bug out, just lead his crew in a retreat on foot, easily avoiding the enemy column. There would be no dishonor in this because continuing their mission means certain death. It’s five in a damaged tank against 300 enemy soldiers. Collier has the choice to leave, or to stay and continue with the mission until he’s killed. He releases the others to retreat to the Allied line. But they all make the same decision. Being free to choose whether to stay or retreat is what makes this a positive moment, but the content – the outcome – of their choice is certain death. In terms of the elements that the hero values, first, it will destroy the emotional home and family they have created together. Second, they are doing their job, but at the highest possible cost. Third, it honors the deaths of the platoon community they were part of. This problem challenges those elements. Such a decision that Collier feels obliged to take makes this the worst, most poignant, problem that they face. Why does he choose this way? By retreating he would be turning away from a mission, he’d be refusing to do his job. By leaving he’d be dishonoring his platoon community. By leaving he places in jeopardy the larger community of the Allies’ cause. As the crew’s father he feels obliged to defend his family and community. For the audience this is a positive and negative moment, and it alternates back and forth as the characters’ actions and reactions draw it out. It’s almost more climactic than the climax that follows. This choice in fact is the Crisis Decision, but the choice is provided by the problem itself. In The Hundred-Foot Journey Hassan is offered a lucrative high-ranking position in a prestige restaurant in Paris. Being a choice makes this Crisis problem positive, plus it arises in an unexpected way. The outcome is also to Hassan’s material benefit. But it also takes him away from the Kadam family and the new home in this French village they have built, and from Marguerite.

Another way that the Crisis Problem can be unexpected is when the problem itself is positive for the protagonist, but in a way that injures him more profoundly. In Man of Steel the final problem is Superman standing beside the hologram of his natural father, Jor-El, in one of the Krypton terraforming ships, looking down over an Earth city being remade. It’s a dire problem because Superman sees Earth’s horrific fate unfolding below him. But it’s positive because he is finally able to meet his natural father, see him beside him, hear his voice, feel the kind of man he was. This is what he most wanted all his life, to know who he was and where he came from. So it’s a positive moment when he connects with his Krypton origins, his family, but in the same moment he knows that all of that is now gone, it vanished when his pod made its way from Krypton a lifetime ago. Then comes Superman’s Crisis Decision: whether to help a New Krypton emerge on Earth, or help his adopted world fight back against its destruction. This moment is intensely painful for Superman, and yet he also received a benefit that he always wanted. In 12