by Bill Johnson
I was recently a judge in a
screenwriting contest. I noted a particular issue in scripts by inexperienced
writers. They often used a shift in tone to create a dramatic effect. For
example, a script with a realistic tone shifting to a comic tone. Or a script
with a realistic tone shifting to a melodramatic tone.
These shifts can have the
effect of disrupting the flow of a story.
To understand why this
happens, consider that the foundation stone for what I teach about writing in A
Story is a Promise is that a story creates movement, and the movement
transports the audience.
That movement can be simple:
boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Or complex: Mulholland Drive.
Memento.
To understand this jarring
effect, consider that you have grown up in Portland,
Oregon, you are downtown, and request an Uber
ride to the Portland
airport, which is East. The driver shows up and gets on Highway 26, driving
West.
You're going to have a
visceral reaction to this. The direction of the movement of the vehicle is
wrong. At a minimum, you're probably wishing you called a cab. If you are a
young woman, alone, and it's night, you are probably having more desperate
thoughts.
The reaction to a shift in
tone in a movie, novel, or play is more subtle, but the reaction is the same.
You go from sitting back to enjoy the ride to wondering why something just
happened. You have been bumped from the story.
I'm not suggesting a movie
can't have a twist. In the recent film Arrival, the main character appears to
be having flash back about the birth and death of a daughter. These are
actually flash forwards. I was tremendously impressed by the skill with which
this was pulled off. But the issue of how we and the aliens in the movie
interpret time was part of the story. The twist arose from the nature of the
movement of the film.
Years ago Peter O'Toole was
in a movie where he's an English aristocrat who believes he's Jesus Christ. He
hangs himself on a cross. His extended family is desperate that he have a heir
to continue the family lineage.
At the end of the film, Peter
appears to be normal and goes off to attend a session of the House of Lords.
But when seen from his point of view, he's switched from thinking he's Jesus to
believing he's Jack the Ripper.
While the movie has a comic
tone, Peter's family has always been in deadly earnest about the need to
reshape his personality. The movie always had a realistic tone under the
comedy.
A more recent example comes
from the Men in Black series. In the first film, there's an overall comic tone
but the character played by Tommy Lee Jones gives the story a moral center. He
looks at humanity and individuals with a clear gaze. It's a wonderful film.
The most recent film, Men in
Black: International, has one of the main characters played as a buffoon.
Buffoons carry no dramatic weight. So the plot ambles along until the movie is
over.
That shift in tone from
comedic with a serious undertone to borderline slapstick deflates the action.
It might have worked in a stand alone film, but as part of a series it just
feels like the movie is going West when the airport is East.
Whether a dramatic effect is
within the scope of a story's overall movement or not is situation where a
writer might need to lean on skilled readers to convey whether an effect was
amazing or disconcerting.
The recent online commotion
over the ending of Game of Thrones is an example of what happens when the
expectations of an audience are violated.
*********************
Bill Johnson is the author of
A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling, available on Amazon and
Smashwords.
