It\u2019s easy to think that because life permits something, then story must too. After all, stories are allowed things like starships, unicorns and Dr Evil, so it would seem that stories are more capacious than life, holding everything life offers, and then some.<\/p>\n
Well, yes and no.<\/p>\n
Yes: stories get to have starships and unicorns, while life does not. But then again, life is permitted randomness, which stories basically may not have.<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s say you were writing a Manhattan-set rom-com. You\u2019re getting to the denouement. Mr Lovely is racing through Central Park to greet his girlfriend, Fraulein Gorgeous, and ask her to marry him. We all anticipate that Fraulein G is going to say one ditzy thing, do one charming thing, and then say yes. We\u2019ll laugh a little, shed a tear, then move on, happy.<\/p>\n
But Life might have other thoughts. So, let\u2019s say, in reality, Mr Lovely was racing through the park, when \u2013 oh, I don\u2019t know \u2013 a subway tunnel collapses, or an ice cream truck hits him, or (why not?) an overflying airplane accidentally releases some blue ice, which falls 20,000 feet and splatters his romantically-inclined skull.<\/p>\n
(Blue ice? Um. It comes from aircraft toilets and it shouldn\u2019t leak, but sometimes does. In the 1970s, some blue ice struck a chapel in London and caused so much damage, the building had to be demolished.)<\/p>\n
Now, because Life can and does release blue ice over major cities, there\u2019s no reason in fact why the Lovely \/ Gorgeous romance might not be ended by a lump of falling waste. But a story can\u2019t handle that.<\/p>\n
Story demands a unity of logic and (ideally) a unity of theme too.<\/strong><\/p>\n Take the logic part first. Although things can and do happen for essentially no reason, stories are our way of putting the meaning back in. That reason can operate within the boundaries of strict logic. (The detective got DNA results back from the lab, which led her to Bad Guy\u2019s house, which allowed her to \u2026) But it can equally well operate within almost purely metaphorical ones \u2013 ones that deliver thematic coherence to your story.<\/p>\n Take, for example, the war film, Bridge over the River Kwai<\/em>.<\/p>\n In that film, Colonel Nicholson (the Alec Guinness character) is a British officer who has become a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese. The POWs are ordered to build a railway bridge to help the Japanese war effort. Nicholson \u2013 as a way to maintain his self-respect? as a way to show off the skills and resourcefulness of the British army? \u2013 becomes obsessed with building the perfect bridge. When Anglo-American commandos then prepare to sabotage the bridge, Nicholson becomes conflicted, seeking to protect \u2018his\u2019 bridge. In the concluding firefight, he is wounded and falls onto the detonator\u2019s plunger, thereby destroying the bridge.<\/p>\n In one way, this is just a causally coherent explanation for how the bridge came to be built, then destroyed. But no viewer simply experiences it like that. There\u2019s something about Nicholson\u2019s journey \u2013 the obsession, the perfectionism, the death, the explosion \u2013 that gives a kind of coherence to everything that\u2019s happened before. If you took out the two minutes of film around that final firefight and the destruction of the bridge, you\u2019d have essentially nothing. Lots of prettily filmed events, but no story.<\/p>\n So the Lovely \/ Gorgeous romance + blue ice killing just doesn\u2019t work as story. Yes, you could make that an opening scene. (The rest of the novel then becomes about Fraulein Gorgeous coming to terms with the random death of her beloved.) And indeed, life-changing random events provide the kick-off for plenty of stories.<\/p>\n Generally though, you are always \u2013 via strict causal logic, or metaphor \u2013 seeking to pull events into an orderly shape. In the end, you\u2019re about creating emotional journeys and a sense of derived meaning.<\/p>\n Life just doesn\u2019t offer that neatness.<\/strong><\/p>\n Journeys don\u2019t end until you die. And meanings come from us, and our story-making desire, more than from life itself.<\/p>\n The more dense you can make your storytelling \u2013 neat causal logic plus an overlay of metaphor and character journey \u2013 the stronger and richer your final story will be.\u00a0<\/p>\n In short, life is great, but it\u2019s baggy. If you want your story to look right, I recommend the corset. Breathe out, lace up tight \u2013 and don\u2019t eat.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s easy to think that because life permits something, then story must too. After all, stories are allowed things like starships, unicorns and Dr Evil, so it would seem that stories are more capacious than life, holding everything life offers, and then some. Well, yes and no. Yes: stories get to have starships and unicorns,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n