A Story is a Promise Blog

Beginning a story in an active voice is a crucial aspect of storytelling. Creating a story premise can be a great help toward accomplishing that goal. A story premise sets out a story's core dramatic issue , the movement of that issue toward resolution, and the fulfillment that resolution sets up for the story's audience. Dramatic Issue A story's core dramatic issue is the issue at the heart of a story's promise. Dramatic issues or ideas revolve around human needs. The need to be loved. To have control of one's fate. To feel needed. To be able to overcome obstacles. To be able to grow and heal from life's wounds. To understand and make sense of the events of life. To experience life in a deeply-felt way. The important point is that storytellers be able to name the dramatic issue at the heart of the stories they are telling. If perceiving a story's core dramatic issue is difficult fo...

A fundamental principle for a popular Hollywood film is that it asks the audience to care, typically about a main character. Disclosure Day starts by introducing us to a young man involved in tech who has stolen some data storage devices from a powerful organization. He manages to escape with a young woman. We’re given no reason to care. She had studied to be a nun, but that feels more like a plot device when she discovers what the young man is trying to reveal to the world. When we meet Emily Blount’s character, she's the live wire that runs through the film. She wants to be more than a local weather girl in a backwater TV market. I call this a dramatic truth. We meet her, we learn her dramatic truth. I’ve been posting about this since I put up a website in 1995. My writing disclosure day, so to speak. This explains the mixed reviews for Disclosure Day. We eventually learn a dramatic truth for the young man, and even deeper into the film, the ‘Bad’ guy. For anyone wh...

James Merriot has a shiny new space engines certification, a mountain of self-doubt, and exactly zero job offers. Desperate for work, James swallows his anxiety and takes a leap of faith, applying for a position in a remote, tiny mining village hidden deep in the asteroid belt. He expected to fix heavy machinery and hide from the world. He didn't expect the station's beautiful manager to steal his heart the moment he arrived. He gets the job, but James quickly realizes this station is nothing like he imagined. Here, mining isn't done with massive drills, but with a unique herd of mechanical animals that ingest and smelt the ore. As the new mechanic, James is thrust into the role of lead caretaker for the robotic pack. Between wrestling with his own insecurities and keeping the mechanical sheep, cows, and bulls running, James has his hands full. His quiet life gets beautifully complicated when his feelings for his gorgeous boss deepen—just as her wonderfully eccentri...

One aspect of a well told story is to evoke an environment; what it feels like to be in it. Paul Hollis' novel, Loose Ends , from his Hollow Man series, offers some wonderful examples in its first chapter. A note in passing, even the title, Loose Ends , conveys something about the story and plot. Both a character and a situation can be at loose ends. Opening line... "Life goes on," he said, "even when you don't want it to." This conveys something about the main character's state as the story begins. Continuing... 'The words hung in the air, heavy with resignation, as if he uttered them not for comfort but to confirm some unwavering truth. Outside, he knew the world would press forward with its usual indifference; down in the street bus brakes screeched, car horns blared, and pedestrians and pedestrians weaved through crowds of living ghosts as the world moved on with us or without us.' Note how clearly this evokes this place bu...

I recently viewed the film Obsession and found it thoughtful and intelligent in the vein of Good Dog, Broken Bird, and, going back, Companion. These films all have strong, visual stories and thoughtful storytelling and ideas. They are about something. In Obsession, an emotionally stunted young man treated by psych meds turns out to be practicing how to tell a young woman he works with that he has feelings for her. Later, she even invites him to tell her how he feels, but he can't. In a curio shop, he finds the One Wish Willow and asks that his friend be in love with him. His wish is granted. The first few days are glorious, but then she creates a shrine with the body of his recently dead cat that passed from an overdose of his spilled psych meds. The film slowly develops what it's like for the young man to be with someone who is obsessed with him. Until the ending, when he understands he can only escape her obsession through his death or hers. The utter horror...

The unconscious is where we store memories. To help compact this storage of a huge volume of memories, feelings are shorn from each memory. Scientists have discovered that when people retrieve memories, they can be guided to attach different feelings to them than those that were originally experienced. The unconscious is also where fixed ideas about who we are and what we think about our place and role in the world are embedded. Think of ideas buried there broadcasting a message, like a radio transmitter. 24/7. You might think of yourself worthy, but buried in your unconscious could be the message that you are not. Or any powerful message that drives your conscious feelings and awareness. The conscious mind is, in most people, consumed by measuring and weighing things. Our relationships, our standing compared to others, how we judge and measure ourselves compared to others. In most people, a significant part of the conscious mind is engrossed in these issues. Narrative tension...

The power of a story is in the intensity of its scenes. Each scene should be a complete experience unto itself, something readers can immerse themselves into. In a powerful scene, readers can surrender themselves to the story. They can let the situation take care of them. But this requires not a dry description of events, but an unexpected revelation of feelings and illuminations of ideas and understanding. To write an intense scene, write it as an evocation of what an environment feels like to character, what a character feels in reaction to events. To do this, feel your way into a story, into a scene, into a moment in a scene. Many writers enter a scene from their head, a conceptualizing of details, what's going to happen next. It's a map of a journey, an outline, if you will, but not the journey itself. For many, once they start down this path of understanding their story by conceptualizing where it's going next, they can't stop drawing that map. To liv...