|
"Cadillacs and Cake"Cynthia's Column December 2001 Stephen King, in an interview I heard recently, talked about the difference between novels that tell stories and those that focus solely on character and setting. He said that a novel without a story was like a Cadillac without an engine. It might look great, but it wouldn't take you anywhere. I am wholly in this camp. As a writer and as a reader, my heart is in story. And it can be such a simple thing. I'm not asking for the moon, here. Yesterday my daughter Molly and I were driving down a winding road near our house. And on every telephone pole was a hand-made sign saying "Lost Terrier."When those disappeared we drove another two blocks and started seeing, tacked to trees and stop-signs, another set of home-made signs scrawled on sheets of typing paper. These said, "Found Yorkie." It didn't take much to add Yorkshire and Terrier together. We called just to make sure these two sign-ers hooked up, but it was a darling little story told in four words over the course of a few blocks. Lost Terrier. Found Yorkie. And they lived happily ever after. What are the basic requirements of story? What makes something a story? That it has a beginning, middle and end? For a start. In movies we summarize three act structure thus:Act One, get your hero up a tree. Act Two, throw stones at him. And Act Three, get him down. I tell my students that the key to story is conflict. If you don't have a problem, you don't have a story. Our Bill Johnson, in his popular book on writing "A Story is A Promise" summarizes story as just that. A promise. For me the magic of storytelling lies somewhere in that circle of light around the campfire and a voice quietly telling a story, making us lean closer to the fire to hear what happens next. My grandmother was a wonderful story teller. For many years she would tell campfire stories at church camps for children in the mountains. Each week she would tell a whole book, one fifth of the story each night. And she would dress up in costumes to go with them. As an old Indian woman, to tell a Grace Moon book. Or whatever character was needed. She would divide the book into five parts and tell them in fifteen minute installments, standing lit by the leaping flames of the bonfire, leaving her young listeners hanging in suspense at the end of each "chapter." No matter how much we would beg her at breakfast to tell us what happened next, she would never even give us a hint. Even though she was our grandmother and we promised we wouldn't tell another soul, it was no good. We had to wait until dark like all the other kids to find out what happened next. The magic is in "what if?" And "what next?" I didn't realize how my grandmother's campfire stories had influenced my own writing life until years later, after I'd done a dozen or so TV movies. I suddenly realized that what she did, break down a book into 15 minute installments to retell the story, was exactly what I was doing when I adapted a novel into a TV movie. I break a book down into seven acts, structured with a cliff hanger every fifteen minutes for commercials. It seems so obvious to me in hindsight, but the realization of it was a big surprise to me. Oh my God! I'm telling stories like Gram used to! Only the flickering light is the TV screen instead of the campfire. It suddenly became easy to see how directly connected we are as storytellers to the very first campfire yarn-spinners who re-enacted the hunt for the tribe. The excitement of a good story is in anticipation and hope. Several years ago I went to a production of a play adapted from Kafka's Metamorphosis. You remember that one, about the man who turns into a giant cockroach? I found it an ordeal, though wonderfully acted and dramatically staged. Halfway through I took a visual poll of the audience members in the rows around me. Fifty percent of them were asleep. Really. Eyes closed, heads sagging asleep. It wasn't boredom. Nothing about the play was boring. It was that there was nothing to hope for. Nothing to anticipate. The guy was a giant cockroach and he would either stay a bug or die one. It was all too clear that there was no chance of getting out of this nightmare. What if death? Lost ‘em. Hopelessness puts us to sleep. And a good story should be about waking us up. Seamus Heaney, the Irish Nobel Prize winning poet wrote a new translation of Beowulf recently which became a New York Times best seller. Do you know what that means? The oldest book in the English language, required reading dreaded by college students for hundreds of years, which you probably read and barely remember now, became a New York Times best seller? Well, it's a hell of a yarn. There's a reason this story has lasted more than a thousand years. It's about an incredibly scary monster and the most powerful, heroic warrior of his time in a battle to the death. After dinner one night, I started reading a page out loud to Nick and Jake, my teenage son and step son. I didn't tell them what it was, I just said, "I'm reading a great book. Listen to this:
God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping. The bane of the race of men roamed forth, hunting for a prey in the high hall. Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it until it shone above him, a sheer keep of fortified gold..." When I was a student at UCLA film school I saw a wonderful short film that a talented fellow student had made and I wish I knew his/her name. The film was called "Eating Cake."It took place in a one-room apartment with kitchenette. An old black man comes in with a sack of groceries. Out of the bag he pulls flour, sugar and all you'd need to make a cake. And he proceeds to make one. Stirs it up, puts it in pans and bakes it. Then he takes it out, cools in, frosts it generously with chocoloate. Puts candles in. Lights the candles. Sings "Happy Birthday" to himself. Blows out the candles. And eats the cake. With great pleasure. How simple. And how wonderful. A great story is one of the simple joys in life. What if? And what happens next? Cynthia Whitcomb is president of Willamette Writers, and has had 29 of her screenplays produced. She is author of The Writers' Guide to Writing Your Screenplay and The Writers' Guide to Selling Your Screenplay. She teaches screenwriting classes at Portland State University.and through Willamette Writers. |