Recently I began to dig into a book called Story. It is a handbook for writing screen plays for movies. No …I have no aspirations towards writing for the silver screen, but in preparation for Classical Writing – Shakespeare, I have spent a lot of time for the past two years reading books about how to write fiction, biographies, and plays.
Story is by a ‘famous’ [I never heard of him] screenplay writer Robert McKee. He discusses
1. the standard plot that most people like,
2. the loose plot,
3. the ‘anti-plot’ plot.
The standard plot has all motivations clearly defined and rationalized, and all ends tied at the end. It is ‘classic’ in the sense that it has existed since the earliest plays were written, but also ‘classic’ in the sense that it is a form that most human beings enjoy watching for the satisfaction of being presented with an orderly world, and with good moral endings.
The loose plot mirrors the standard plot in basic structure, but it ends less completely, there are still bad guys out there, the world is not perfect, and not everything that happens is completely rationally accounted for. That is, even if potentially there might be rational explanations for most actions, we are not privy to them.
The anti plot would be like a Monty Python movie or even the less structured artsy films that seek to ‘explore’ events or feelings without coming up with a particular plot. It may or may not ‘arrive’ at the end. It’s streams of consciousness sort of thinking. Often unsatisfying unless the thrust of the movie resonates particularly with its audience. It is the least frequented movie type.
All three types of plots have their purposes and their audiences. I am not writing to endorse one or the other. McKee claims that the standard plot commands the most viewers. In fact, he calls the ‘standard plot’ the ‘arch-plot’ and describes its viewers (most of the movie viewing public) like this:
Most human being s believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence; that their existence operates through continuous time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality, and that inside this reality events happen for explainable and meaningful reasons.
Most people enjoy movies of the standard plot. His description of ‘most humans” preferences reminded me of movies like Superman, Spiderman, etc. All conflict in those movies is ‘external’. There is an enemy that all good people band together against. The super hero and the strong guys fight that enemy to destroy him and save their world.
This is a fine movie to teach kids that there is good and bad in the world, that they need to side with the good, and that bad will not triumph in the end. It is a fine message, it is a fine plot line. When we just need to kick back with a movie, this sort relaxes us because it does not demand much of our mental or empathetic faculties. All we have to do is nod and agree [and perhaps wag a finger at a kid… maybe?].
But there are problems with a constant movie diet of the standard plot too. The standard plot offers an external view of life which pretty much says that “I am OK”. THAT is why it does not demand much of me.
It’s the bad guys in the world that are out to get me that I need to worry about. So my problems are all on the outside. I need to fight those guys to make this world safe for me and mine. That sort of external view of life takes the problem away from me, and it confirms what I like to hear, which is that whatever I perceive as bad in the rest of the world something I have to be on the watch for and fight against (be that in my local clubs, at work, or in church or wherever things are rubbing me wrong.) It is an individualistic and frankly self-centered view of the world. It assumes that I am right to start with, it does not ask of me to empathize with others or learn another point of view because I am already “OK”.
In addition, McKee’s insistence that we as humans tend to believe in a consistent, causally interconnected reality which we can explain and make meaning out of seems to me dangerous, also. The underlying assumption here, is that *I* with my simple mind and with my fallen nature can expect to fully understand and appreciate the reasons for most things that go on in my world. That along with my mandate in the previous paragraph to go out and fight the issues I disagree with makes me a lone ranger who needs to fix my world to protect my own interests.
The problem with the assumption that I really can understand all that goes on in the world is that so often I don’t fully [if at all] understand reasons for what goes on around me, and worst of all often I don’t understand the people around me very well (or at least not completely). When I think I do understand them, and I act decisively and irreversibly on that understanding, I may hurt myself and potentially alienate those others precisely because I do not understand as well as I think I do. But that only exacerbates the problem. They become ‘the bad guys’ because “I am OK” and therefore I get alienated further.
Most movies feed us those simple ideals all the time.
A recent survey across America showed that over half of us never read a book. We read magazines, newspapers, Internet blogs 🙂 and more than anything we grativate towards TV and movies.
This lack of literature, or only getting literature through movie adaptations seems a dangerous trend since movies so often only give us only the externals: simplistic morals of fighting bad guys.
Books–at least in the case of well written literature–more so allow us the luxury of basking in the thoughts of others, opening up to us thoughts that we would never think of our own, teaching us to have understanding, compassion, and empathy with others more than movies are usually able to do, enriching and broadening our own minds. Whenever we have read a great book and see the movie made of it, the inevitable conclusion for most of us seems to be that the book was better. There is a reason for that.
Here’s to books!!! Read them to yourself, read them aloud with your kids, EVEN when the kids are 18 years old. Replace some of your movie nights with reading aloud to each other instead.
And just to tie it in with writing, since this is a blog about writing–broad reading, regular reading, regular immersion in complex sentences and varied vocabulary are the ‘osmosis’ part of teaching writing. The words, the phrases, the ways of thinking stick with your students, even when they don’t know they are being taught.
Keep a book on your night stand always. Read before you go to sleep.
I have a stack of books on my stand, and I read a chapter of each every night before turning out the light. Currently my stack consists of Daniel Deronda by Eliot, Letters to Malcolm: On Prayer by C. S. Lewis, Plato’s Dialogues, Story (as mentioned above) by McKee, a fiction manuscript of my own that I proof a chapter of each night, Progymnasmata by Kennedy, and the Bible. In addition our family is reading aloud War and Peace by Tolstoy and also One Corpse too Many by Peters [A Brother Cadfael Mystery].
Your stack may look quite different from mine, but read and read broadly. Read… and read!! 🙂
Lene