Michael Arndt’s Eight Steps for “Setting the Story in Motion”
One of the hidden gems on the 4-disc Toy Story 3 Blu-Ray package from Disney is a ten-minute short film by screenwriter Michael Arndt. In it, Arndt reveals the eight step process that he found in films like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles that helped him in writing Toy Story 3. Despite its short length, Arndt’s theory is an excellent contribution that deserves a closer look.1) Show Your Main CharacterIntroduce the audience to your main character. As most of the story follows their perspective, you need to establish him in the mind of the audience. In the case of Toy Story, this is Woody. He is a toy that comes alive when humans aren’t watching.2) Introduce the Universe that They Live In.Give your audience a chance to see the world that the protagonist lives in. In the case of Toy Story, we see that Woody lives in Andy’s room with the other toys.3) Show Your Character’s Grand PassionShow your character doing the thing that they love the most. What is their Grand Passion? In Woody’s case, his grand passion is his place as Andy’s favourite toy. He has the favoured position Andy’s bed and the introductory playtime sequences always show him as the star of Andy’s imagination.4) Show Your Character’s Hidden Flaw.Only boring protagonists are perfect. Show the audience your main character’s flaw. Give them a flaw that comes out of their grand passion, that comes out of the thing they love doing the most. In Woody’s case, it’s pride. As Andy’s favourite toy, he has a lot of pride about his place in Andy’s bedroom. It is only natural that he gets his comeuppance.5) Hint at Storm Clouds on the HorizonVery subtly, hint to your audience that there is trouble out on the horizon. In the case of Toy Story, those storms clouds are Andy’s birthday party. All of the other toys are afraid of being replaced. Only Woody, proud of his status as Andy’s favourite tool, is unworried.6) Turn Your Character’s World Upside DownSomething comes into your hero’s life and turns it upside down. It takes away their grand passion. In the case of Woody, the introduction of Buzz Lightyear changes everything. Because Buzz is such a cool tool, Andy and all of the other toys prefer him. Woody finds himself relegated to the Toy Chest while Buzz gets the preferred spot on Andy’s bed. Woody has lost his greatest possession: his status as Andy’s favourite toy.7) Add Insult to InjuryIf that is not enough, you have to add insult to injury. It is not enough to take away your protagonist's grand passion, you always have to humiliate him in the process. In the case of Toy Story, not only does he lose his place as favourite toy to Buzz, Buzz has no idea that he’s a toy! As Woody loses favour, you can see his frustration at Buzz’s cluelessness. He’s being replaced by an imbecile! This step is important to show your character’s frustration at a world that is completely unfair.8) Have Your Character Make the Wrong ChoiceThis is the big one. Bring your main character to a fork in the road. At this fork, they have two choices: a right choice and a wrong choice. Of course the character makes a wrong choice. Having seen what he has gone through, we understand perfectly why he makes the wrong choice. We even WANT him to make the wrong choice. This wrong choice comes out of his grand passion and provokes a crisis that sets us on our way to Act 2. Let’s take Toy Story again. In Toy Story, Woody, having been displaced and insulted by the deluded Buzz Lightyear, decides to try to knock Buzz behind the dresser so that Andy will have to take him to Pizza Planet. The plan goes awry, Buzz is knocked out the window, and the other toys blame Woody, leaving him no choice but to find and return Buzz to Andy’s room. That leads us right into Act 2.Arndt shows us the same structure at play in Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. The structure works well because the plot develops from the hero’s internal character, making it more personal. It also gives us something that character, alongside the main plot, must resolve inside himself. In the case of Toy Story, Woody not only brings back Buzz safely, but he also learns how to overcome his flaws and earn the friendship of Buzz. The hero’s journey becomes as much metaphysical as physical.But how can we apply these lessons to our own stories. In my case, Arndt’s theory forced a number of changes in the opening Act of Evermore: Call of the Nocturne. While I found that I had followed several of his steps already, thinking his theory allowed me to make some changes that greatly improved the opening act. Please let me go through it one step at a time.1) Show Your Main CharacterIn Evermore: Call of the Nocturne, the reader is introduced to Mmorpg, a geekish computer nerd who has difficulty dealing with people directly. He prefers the virtual world to the real world as he has far more control over it.2) Introduce the Universe that They Live In.Mmorpg lives in Vancouver, BC. But his real home is at his laboratory at the University of British Columbia where he administrates a virtual online world known as Evermore.3) Show Your Character’s Grand PassionMmorpg’s greatest passion is Evermore itself. Having created the most popular Massively-Multiplayer Online (MMO) game in the world, Mmorpg is understandably proud of his accomplishment. He believes that Evermore will change the world for the better and thus he is very protective of it, allowing only himself access to the computer code that sustains it.4) Show Your Character’s Hidden Flaw.Mmorpg’s hidden flaw is his pride towards his creation. Enamoured by its possibilities, Mmorpg is unable or unwilling to see its possible consequences, both to himself and others.5) Hint at Storm Clouds on the HorizonDuring the opening chapters, Evermore’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) is mentioned nervously. In a few days, stock will be sold in the online world, making all of its founders, especially Mmorpg, incredibly rich.6) Turn Your Character’s World Upside DownMmorpg’s world is shattered when a little girl dies inside Evermore. Having written the security protocols that are meant to protect people inside the virtual world, Mmorpg is dumbfounded by failure. He continually insists that they are perfect despite the obvious evidence to the contrary.7) Add Insult to InjuryWith the death of the little girl, it is obvious that the government will move in to shut down Evermore. All of Mmorpg’s hard work, all of his sacrifices will have been for nothing. While he watches helplessly, his life’s work is falling to pieces.8) Have Your Character Make the Wrong ChoiceRather than choose to go straight to the authorities, as he should, Mmorpg chooses instead to perpetrate a massive coverup. He seals off the crime scene and disables the logout function, trapping everyone including the killer inside Evermore. To ensure that nobody gets wise, he tricks anyone who attempts to log out by trapping them inside another virtual reality where they log out, feel tired, and go to bed for a nap. Given that he can’t keep people locked up in the virtual world forever, Mmorpg is forced to find the killer. To that end, his organization hires a dangerous mercenary called Blue and we are into the 2nd Act.It was here that Arndt’s advice really paid dividends. Originally, Mmorpg simply makes the choice because, well because the plot demanded it. I hadn’t made the case in the character of Mmorpg why he would do such a thing. With Arndt’s theory, I made his connection to his creation far stronger in the early going, introduced the storm crowds (the government) that threatens to take away his dream, and confront him directly with the moral choice that leads us into the 2nd Act. Now we know why Mmorpg makes that decision and more importantly, we want him to make that decision. Furthermore, this moral choice makes Mmorpg’s eventual comeuppance (no spoilers) and reconciliation far more effective.Michael Arndt himself states that these steps are not for every story, but they are a useful tool to help you develop the opening to your story. In my case, they helped to make a good opening even better. I hope that they’ll help you too.
The Sentimentalists Review
Memories are both a blessing and a curse. They have the emotional power to take us back to our greatest experiences but they also insidiously unreliable, constantly lying to us about our own past. Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel, The Sentimentalists, plays on this contradictions. Her Giller Prize winning novel, a near-autographical take on her own father, deals with the tantalizing power of memory as well as its inability to bring us closure.After a breakdown in her own life, the protagonist returns to Government House in Ontario to recover and to reconcile with her long-absent and dying father Napoleon. The story alternates between the present and past. The present is told by the protagonist and directly deals with her own feelings and memories of her father while the past is told to her by her father. These stories deal with his earlier life and later his experiences in Vietnam.It is in reading these passions that you begin to understand while Skibsrud’s first effort was universally praised. Her prose is outstanding. It’s poetic and flows naturally without any sign of artificial writing. The prose belies her past work in poetry as her sentences and paragraphs are beautifully constructed. Her style is somewhat reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje whose text reads more like poetry than prose fiction.However, outside of the beautifully written text, there isn’t really much else to recommend. The story of a person trying to piece together the past of their father has been done many times before with far more effectiveness. Recounting horrifying experiences in war has been done countless times before as well. Skibsrud’s recounts of Vietnam warfare and the atrocities (seemingly) committed by Napoleon’s troop are generic, countlessly replayed in other books, TV shows and movies. On this, Skibscrud may be understandable limited by the experiences of her father and the written record on which the events in Vietnam are based.However, these same events could have been far more compelling with a stronger narrative structure. While the hook of the novel is the daughter’s search to understand what happened to her father in order to understand her own life, this conflict was not presented in a way that hooked me to the story. For the most part I meandered through the story, finding little to drive me towards the end. What this story needed was a MacGuffin, something that becomes the focal point of the protagonist’s search and that when found, provides a measure of illumination and understanding to the reader. The unfinished boat at the beginning of the story holds promise in this regard but it is not truly developed. The boat feels more like an appendage than an essential part of the protagonists history, a real missed opportunity.But perhaps that is not Skibsrud’s point. Instead of providing quick and satisfying conclusions to the reader, she is more interested in showing in how memories, while tantalizing, are never able to provide the answers for which we seek. They are shadows of truth and The Sentimentalists raises these questions effectively at the inconclusive end. While the story itself is rather uncompelling, Skibsrud’s evocation of memory strikes very close to truth. It is for perhaps for this reason that the literary community awarded her the distinguished Giller Prize. Literary juries prize originality above all else and on this score, Skibsrud stands alone by integrating memory into all aspects of her story, from structure to prose, from the beginning to the end. Perhaps the closest corollary that I can think of is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. But in Ishiguro’s work, the story leads to an emotionally devastating finale. In Skibsrud’s debut, I felt nothing. The elements are there, but they are just out of reach.Memories are emotions unresolved and while Skibsrud’s debut effort is not able to tell a effective story, she is to be commended for capturing its essence. While I cannot recommend The Sentimentalists to others for its generic and uncompelling storyline, I recognize that she effectively captures the power and fallacy of memory throughout all aspects of her novel. She has significant writing skills. When she combines these literary skills with a more compelling story, she may very well create the next Great Canadian Novel.
Britney Sanchez Found
UPDATE - Tina deleted the flyer from her home page and I have done the same.UPDATE - They found her. http://twitter.com/Teanah. Apparently, they were tipped off by an anonymous source that she was seen at a Walgreens. Thank goodness. I guess that sometimes prayers are answered.Hi everyone. One of my small pleasures in life is listening to video game podcasts from 1up.com. The social media manager there is Tina Sanchez. On Twitter today, she has listed her sister as missing and believed kidnapped. As I live here in Ottawa, the only thing that I can do is to put out out the message to my network and ask others to help. If you live in the San Francisco area, please keep an eye open for her and report any information, no matter how small, to the numbers listed in the flyer below.Let us all pray for the safe return of Tina's sister.
Macworld Scrivener Review
Macworld has done a detailed review of Scrivener 2.0. When I was choosing which story writing software to buy last year, I didn't really examine Scrivener too much because I just couldn't get into the program. I'm committed to Storyist for now but if you're looking for writing software, you might to give Scrivener another look.
Converting Your Manuscript to ePub
This week, I endeavoured to convert my dear-god-i-hope-it's-true-second-to-last-manuscript into ePub format so that I could send it to my brother to read on his iPhone and check out how it looks on my iPad. It wasn't really necessary at this point, but I was too excited to see how it looked on the electronically-printed page.The result? It was a little trickier than I expected.First, I tried copying the manuscript over into Storyist and then converting in ePub. Unfortunately, I ran into a number of problems. First, when I copied the text over to the Storyist program using the Past and Match option, it removed all of the italics in the manuscript and altered some of the formatting. This is a problem because in E:CotN, I used italics to denote when the character Blue, who has survived a bullet wound to her throat, speaks in our hollow, whispery voice. Without the italics, the text just doesn't look right. I could copy and paste without matching the formatting but this resulted in text that was too small and inconsistent to be used. I could highlight all of the text and change the font type and size, but this would also remove the italics.
The second problem that I had with Storyist is that when you export a manuscript to .ePub, it adds a little space after each line. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem for me but E:CotN has a lot of very specific formatting for newspaper inserts, song lyrics and computer text. With the extra space added after each line and paragraph, there wasn't enough white space to differentiate between the standard prose and the very specific inserts. There is probably some way to change the settings to remove the extra white space and adjust the formatting, but I was too impatient to attempt it. Instead, I tried converting the manuscript directly from the original .pages file.
However, Apple Pages had its own challenges that I eventually overcame. First of all, the convertor didn't recognize that I had chapters. The chapter headings that I had created were simply seen as bolded but normal text. So I took the .ePub template file that Apple has provided online, imported the document's styles into my document, and set all of my chapter titles to use the "Chapter Name" style now available in the Inspector.Next I found there was no page breaks between each of the chapters. This was solved by replacing the page break that I had placed in between the chapters with a section break. Finally, I was puzzled by the extra characters that were showing up in the .ePub text. For example, the title of the my first chapter would read: "Chapter 1 - - The Chapter Title". I finally realized that Pages .ePub convertor also converts the markup that has been accumulating since the editing process began. After accepting all of the changes to the document, the problem disappeared.
As I grew more confident, I was able to start playing around with the manuscript: setting up the title page to look professional, enlarging the standard text so that it would look just right the first time that it is opened in iBooks, and other experiments with the format. As a result, the text looked exactly how it imagined it on the page. I felt a chill of anticipation run down my spine as I gazed upon my electronic manuscript. It almost looked like a real book, except that it my words.So for the most part, I found Pages easier to use in creating .ePub documents. This is no knock on Storyist, I am certain for my next manuscript that I can produce exactly what I want. But for now, Pages has the edge. It's text simply looks more attractive in .ePub than does Storyist.There are many things that I want to play around with before I publish my novel, including starting each chapter halfway down the page instead of at the top. But for now, this looks good enough.
The 9th Circle of Hell – Capitalization and Punctuation
Finally, finally, finally, the edit is done. I have obsessed over it long enough. I have made enough changes. It's time to let it go. Evermore: Call of the Nocturne is ready for its final edit. All I need now is another editor. I'll give myself the rest of the week and weekend off and then start searching for a new editor. It's too bad that Erin won't get chance to edit it again. I think she would have loved some of the changes I made.Part of the reason that it took so long is that I was constantly struggling to establish consistent rules for myself on Capitalization and punctuation. My lifelong habit has been to capitalize for emphasis. For example, "oh my God!"; or "Protect the King!". However, based on Erin review, I have had to make many uncomfortable changes to the capitalization style because I was using them incorrectly and inconsistently.Let's take for example the word sovereign. In Evermore: Call of the Nocturne, the Sovereign of Evermore is an individual who leads the government in Evermore, known as the Consortium. Now in my earlier drafts, I had always capitalized sovereign, no matter how it was used in the sentence. So "Sovereign", "the Sovereign", "my Sovereign", "Sovereign Klein" and "Sovereign of Evermore" were all capitalized. But according to my editor Erin, and the Internet sites that I visited, only the last two should be capitalized. In everything else, the word sovereign, like king or prime minister, should be lower case. Only when the word is used as a proper noun should a title should be capitalized. Thus "Sovereign Klein" becomes "the sovereign" or "my sovereign".But then I ran into another problem. For one word in the English language, these rules are allowed to be broken. That word is God. But they can only be broken based on what you mean by the word god. If you are referring to a general omniscient being, then god should be lower-case when used in a sentence. The confusion comes from one of the unusual traits of Christianity. We quite literally call our god "God". When you refer to the Christian conception of god, then it is considered a proper noun, like Zeus or Ra, and thus must be capitalized.I had this capitalization problem with god, sovereign, strider and kernel. Going through the text and over again until I was using capitalization correctly (I think?) and consistently proved to be a major time sink.The second major problem that I had was with punctuation. More specifically, I had problems with periods and commas. When I was growing up, I was always taught to put two spaces after a period and so when I wrote the novel I put two spaces after every period. It was instinctual. I didn't even have to think about it. However, the current standard (due to the influence of the Internet) has been to put one space after a period. I suppose it looks much better on a typed page. So due to Erin's suggestions, I went back and removed all of the extra spaces. The result: a much more consistent-looking document.Commas proved to be far more challenging. Again, I had always been taught to use liberally, to add one whenever I want the ready to pause. However, Erin notified me that in some circumstances, such as when the comma would precede the word "and" in a list of items, the comma is not necessary. For example:"I went to the store to buy some eggs, bacon, and hashbrowns."can be rewritten without the last comma. Like so:"I went to the store to buy some eggs, bacon and hashbrowns."Having always grown up putting the comma before the word "and", I was fairly uncomfortable with this change. But for those of you who remembered my rule from a previous post, "The editor is (almost) always right", I decided to give it a try. I went through my document and removed all of the unnecessary commas. The only exception that I made was for commas that were in the song lyrics that Vanessa sings during the Goddess Pageant. I left those commas in because the reader to know that there was a slight pause in that place. Otherwise, the song lyrics would not flow correctly.The end result from removing all of these commas was a prose that was relaxed, uncluttered and far smoother to read. The text simply looks more attractive to the eye. I believe that it was a good change.Cormac McCarthy has gone even farther than this. In his novels, it eliminates as much punctuation as possible, including quotation marks. He believes that punctuation gets between the reader and the story. From my own experience, I can definitely understand what he means.Prose style is something that is incredibly personal for each author. While there are rules, there is room for each writer to experiment and find what works for them. In my case, my novel's long gestation period has forced me to confront my old ideas about prose and try out some new ideas. This process has led to a far better novel, but has been as excruciating as the 9th circle of hell.
Back to Ottawa, Back to Work
- Chat with my parents into the long hours of the night.
- Have Christmas dinner at my younger brother's home.
- Play with his adorable little daughter Hanna.
- Go to my older brother's house for Boxing Day dinner.
- Play with his daughter and see the newborn - both adorable.
- Get my butt handed to me in Settlers of Catan (at least Chris didn't win).
- Play Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer (short review: it's awesome).
- Sleep in a room-sized dollhouse.
- Play Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood singleplayer (short review: it's also awesome).
- Have another Christmas dinner at my parents house with Gramma Blurton.
- Fly home, get sick and work the next day.
So aside from the getting sick part, it was a pretty awesome vacation if not a wee bit condensed. My favourite moment was I was showing my little niece my iPad and the thirty or so Disney movies installed on it. This was her actual quote:"I like your movies (pause). I love you."That one just about melted my heart and made me ask my brother if I take her back to Ottawa with me. This year it really hit me how far away from my family I have gone. I only get to seem them twice a year now and a whole new generation of Blurtons are growing up without me. It made me reconsider my move to Ottawa, until I remembered what Ottawa has that Enderby doesn't:Jobs.I wonder if these are the same emotions that my ancestors felt when they made the trip over the ocean from Britain. They must have known that they would never see their families again and yet they still made the trip, looking for a better life. I guess I should count my blessings. At least I get to see my family twice a year.After the vacation, I returned to work for a quiet two days and then spent the long weekend recovering from my illness. Unfortunately, I gave it to my roommate. In the meantime, I did finally finish the line edit of Evermore: Call of the Nocturne. I had never imagined that it would have taken so long (approximately 6 months). I still have a few pages of notes of things that I need to go to fix but for the most part, the next draft is ready. My next step will be to hire an editor to do another line edit, clean up the text and finalize it for publication). I pray that the final edit will not take nearly as long.Oh yeah, my birthday party is coming up. This year I'm turning 32. Thankfully, I have aged well. The birthday party will be at Pub Italia on Wednesday at 5:30 pm. If you don't know where Pub Italia is, then I probably don't want you showing up to my party. :) Here's to 32 more glorious years.Until next time, keep the comments coming.