The Anatomy of Story (31 page)

If you go further and show the
change
of the seasons, you give the audience a detailed and powerful expression of the growth or decay of the hero or the world.

If you cover all four seasons in your story, you tell the audience you are shifting from a linear story, which is about some kind of development, to a circular story, which is about how things ultimately remain the same. You can present this positively or negatively. A positive circular story usually emphasizes man's connection to the land. Human beings are animals, and happy to be so. The cycle of life, death, and rebirth is natural and worthy of celebration, and we can learn much by studying the secrets nature reveals at its gentle, steady pace. Thoreau's
Walden
uses the seasons in this way.

A negative circular story usually emphasizes that humans are bound by the forces of nature, just like other animals. This approach is tricky because it can quickly grow dull. Indeed, the great weakness of many nature documentaries is that the plot, which almost always matches the seasons, is predictable and hence boring. An animal might give birth in the spring, hunt and be hunted in the summer, mate in the fall, and face starvation in the winter. But sure enough, the animal returns in the spring to give birth again.

The classic method of connecting the seasons to the story line—done beautifully in
Meet Me in St. Louis
and
Amarcord—
uses a one-to-one connection of season to drama and follows this course:

■ Summer: The characters exist in a troubled, vulnerable state or in a world of freedom susceptible to attack.

■ Fall: The characters begin their decline.

■ Winter: The characters reach their lowest point.

■ Spring: The characters overcome their problem and rise.

You may want to use this classic connection or, to avoid cliche, purposely cut against it. For example, a character might decline in the spring and rise again in the winter. By changing the normal sequence, you not only short-circuit the audience's expectations but also assert that humans, though of the natural world, are not enslaved by its patterns.

Holidays and Rituals

Holidays, and the rituals that mark them, give you another technique for expressing meaning, pacing the story, and showing its development. A ritual is a philosophy that has been translated into a set of actions that are repeated at specific intervals. So any ritual you use is already a dramatic event, with strong visual elements, that you can insert in your drama. A holiday expands the scope of the ritual to a national scale and so allows you to express the political as well as the personal and social meaning of the ritual.

If you wish to use a ritual or holiday in your story, you must first examine the philosophy inherent in that ritual and decide in what way you agree or disagree with it. In your story, you may wish to support or attack all or part of that philosophy.

A Christmas Story

(screenplay by Jean Shepherd & Leigh Brown & Bob Clark., 1983)

The Great American Fourth of July and

Other Disasters

(novel
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
by Jean Shepherd,

screenplay by Jean Shepherd1982)
The humorist Jean Shepherd is a master at constructing a story around a particular holiday. He begins by combining a holiday with a storyteller reminiscing about his family. This sets up a Utopia of childhood for the audience, where each viewer nestles in the recognition of living happily within a family. The particular holiday creates a time passageway, rocketing the viewer back to his childhood. Shepherd does this by having the voice-over storyteller recount the funny things that happened every year on that holiday. For example, his little brother always wore a snowsuit that was too big for him. His dad always got a gift that would infuriate his mom. He always had to deal with the neighborhood bullies. And what about the time Flick got his tongue stuck on the flagpole?

Shepherd supports the philosophy of the holiday not in a straightforward or religious way but by pretending to make fun of it, by laughing at the silly things people do at this time every year. But those silly things also make him feel good, especially because they happen every year and because the people of his memory will never grow old. This is the power of the perennial story.

If you use this technique, it is important that you understand the relationship between the ritual, the holiday, and the season in which the holiday occurs. Then orchestrate all of these elements to express change, whether in the hero or in the world.

Hannah and Her Sisters

(by Woody Allen, 1986)
You can see how to connect a holiday to your story and show character change in
Hannah and Her Sisters.
In this film, the holiday is Thanksgiving. A uniquely American celebration going back to colonial times, it embodies the formation of a community to give thanks for a bountiful harvest and the beginnings of a nation. But Woody Allen doesn't use Thanksgiving to structure the story and provide the underlying theme in the normal way. Instead of focusing on the philosophy of the holiday, Allen creates a story of simultaneous action that crosscuts among three sisters and their husbands or boyfriends. At the beginning of the story, there is no community, either among the characters or in the story structure itself. Allen creates community through the structure by interweaving three different love stories and by using the holiday of Thanksgiving three different times.

The structure works like this. The story begins at a Thanksgiving dinner that all the characters attend with the wrong partners. Then the story fractures into crosscuts among the six individuals. In the middle of the story, they all come together at Thanksgiving again, and this time most are with new, but still wrong, people. The story fractures again into its many simultaneous strands, with the characters struggling and apart. The story ends with each of the characters together at Thanksgiving a third time, but this time part of a real community, because each is now coupled with the right partner. Story and holiday become one. These characters don't talk about Thanksgiving; they live it.

The Single Day

The single day is another increment of time that has very specific effects when used in a story. The first effect is to create simultaneous story movement while maintaining narrative drive. Instead of showing a single character over a long development—the linear approach of most stories—you present a number of characters acting at the same time, right now, today. But the ticking of the hours keeps the story line moving forward and gives the story a sense of compression.

If you use a twelve-hour clock, setting the entire story in one day or one night, you create a funnel effect. The audience senses not only that each of the story strands will be settled at the end of the twelve hours but also that the urgency will increase as the deadline nears.
American Graffiti, Ferris Bueller's Day Off,
and
Smiles of a Summer Night
use this method.

If you use a twenty-four-hour clock, you lessen the urgency and increase the sense of the circular. No matter what may have happened, we return to the beginning, with everything the same, and start all over again. Some writers use this circular sense to highlight change even more.

In this technique, you show that while most things do remain the same, the one or two tilings that have changed in the last twenty-four hours are that much more significant. This technique is the underlying foundation of stories as different as Ulysses and Groundhog Day. (The television show 24 reverses this technique, using the twenty-four-hour clock, stretched over an entire television season, to heighten suspense and pack the plot.)

Notice that this twenty-four-hour circular day has many of the same thematic effects as the four seasons. Not surprisingly, both techniques are often connected with comedy, which tends to be circular, emphasizes society as opposed to the individual, and ends in some kind of communion or marriage. Techniques of circular time are also associated with the myth form, which is based on circularity of space. In many classic myth stories, the hero starts at home, goes on a journey, and returns home to find what was already within him.

Eugene O'Neill uses the single-day technique in
Long Day's Journey into Night.
But unlike
Ulysses,
which covers almost twenty-four hours and evokes the positive qualities of circularity,
Long Day's Journey into Night
covers only about eighteen hours, from morning into night. This gives the story a declining line, from hope to despair, as the family becomes increasingly nasty and the mother moves toward drugged-out madness.

A second major effect of the single-day technique is to emphasize the everyday quality of the drama that is being played out. Instead of cutting out dead time and showing only the big dramatic moments, you show the little events and the boring details that make up the average person's life (as in
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
Implied in this "day in the life" approach is that drama is just as valid, if not more so, for the little guy as for the king.

The Perfect Day

A variation on the single-day technique is the perfect day. The perfect day is a time version of the Utopian moment and as such is almost always used to structure a section of the story, rather than the story itself. Implied in the technique is that everything is in harmony, which limits how long you can use it, since too much time without conflict will kill your story.

The perfect-day technique usually connects a communal activity with a twelve-hour day or night. Communal activity is the crucial element in any
Utopian
moment. Attaching it to a natural increment of time, like dawn to dusk, intensifies the feeling of everything working well together because the harmony is grounded in a natural rhythm. The writers of
Witness
understood this very well when they connected the perfect day with the Amish community building a barn and the two leads falling in love.

Time Endpoint

A time endpoint, also known as a ticking clock, is a technique in which you tell the audience up front that the action must be completed by a specific time. It is most common in action stories
(Speed),
thrillers
(Outbreak),
caper stories (where the characters pull off some kind of heist, as in
Ocean's Eleven),
and suicide mission stories
(The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen).
A time endpoint gives you the benefit of intense narrative drive and great speed, although at the expense of texture and subtlety. It also creates an even faster funnel than the twelve-hour day, which is why it is often used when writers want to give an action story epic scope. The time endpoint lets you show literally hundreds of characters acting simultaneously and with great urgency, without stopping the narrative drive. In these kinds of stories—
The Hunt for Red October
is an example—the time endpoint is usually connected to a single place where all the actors and forces must converge.

A less common but very effective use of the time endpoint is in comedy journey stories. Any journey story is inherently fragmented and meandering. A comic journey makes the story even more fragmented because the forward narrative drive stops every time you do some comic business. Jokes and gags almost always take the story sideways; the story waits while a character is dropped or diminished in some way. By telling the audience up front that there is a specific time endpoint to the story, you give them a forward line they can hang on to through all the meandering. Instead of getting impatient to know what comes next, they relax and enjoy the comic moments along the way. We see this technique in comic journey stories like
The Blues Brothers
and Jacques Tati's
Traffic.

Now that you've explored some techniques for making your story world develop over time, you have to connect the world with the hero's development
at
every
step of the story.
The overall arc—such as slavery to freedom—gives you the big picture of how the world of your story will change. But now you have to detail that development through story structure. Structure is what allows you to express your theme without sermonizing. It is also the way you show the audience a highly textured story world without losing narrative drive.