It is imperative that every type of writing should contain the following:
These twelve parts are as indispensable in writing as are the vital organs to the human body.
The premise is the seed from which the story grows. The premise is the thumbnail synopsis of the story or play you wish to write.
It isn't compulsory, but it is wise to formulate your premise first. You might have an idea or have read or heard something that seems to constitute a good story idea. No matter where your inspiration comes from, you must know exactly what you want to say, why you want to say it, and how far you want to carry it.
If your story pertains to greed, to which you are opposed, you'll want to know in what direction and how far you intend to go with this idea, what will be its final resolution. This crystalization of your story is the premise.
You might want to say: "Greed leads to destruction," or "Greed leads to humiliation," or "Greed leads to isolation," or "Greed leads to loss of love." You can go on indefinitely, formulating premises for yourself, but when you decide on one, capture the one which expresses your idea perfectly. Then you have your story in a nutshell.
The premise should include the basic facts about the character, conflict, and resolution. For instance, "Honesty is the best policy" is not the best premise. We see the character, an honest person. But where is the conflict? This person is honest all through life and all through the play; he's very happy, nobody bothers him. A wonderful life, but a very bad play. But, if we use the premise, "Honesty defeats duplicity"- we know immediately that our honest person is going to engage in conflict with a dishonest person. There is inherent drama in this premise.
In short, the first part of any premise should represent character: honesty, dishonesty, selfishness, ruthlessness, false pride, etc. The second part should represent conflict: "Dishonesty leads to exposure," "Ruthless ambition leads to destruction," etc. The third part should represent the resolution or goal of the play or story.
As we see, a good premise is an indispensable part of good writing. A premise is a goal.
Many so-called scholars ridicule the idea of working out a premise before starting to write a play or story. They state that great stories were written before anyone knew anything about premises. This is true. But it is also true that even the greatest writers wrote more bad plays or stories than good ones. Without direction (a premise), they floundered
When one intends to drive a car from New York to San Francisco, he usually uses a road map for more direct routes and good roads. The premise is the road map for all kinds of writing.
The next thing we ask is, who is going to carry out the author's premise . . . the characters?
Let's see if this is true. Let us suppose that we are intrigued by a braggart. We want to write about him. He claims that he comes from excellent stock, knows the best people, knows everything, in fact. He earns a lot of money, has the greatest hope for the future, and, according to him, he's the greatest guy he knows.
Naturally not a word of this is true. You're justified in asking, "Why all the bluff? The answer is, the poor fellow really has nothing whatsoever to boast about, so he concocts these grand and glorious lies. Bluffers, liars, boasters usually do this sort of thing to cover up their physical or mental inadequacies.
Now, how can this story end? Failure and humiliation for this character seem obvious. So if you're going to write a story about such a character, don't you think it is wise to know in advance how he's going to end up?
If you know the end of your story before you start to write it, you are in a better position to write a good one. Find out who your character is, where he comes from, why he is a failure. Because it's his failure he's trying to cover up with his lying. If you have this advance knowledge, you are in a better position to do a more thorough job.
For such a story I think the premise should be: "Bragging leads to humiliation." This play or story can be a drama, satire, or both, but never a comedy. However, you can make a fine comedy out of the bragging idea if you change your premise to read like this: "Bragging leads to success." Read The Show-Off by George Kelly. It is a satirical comedy written on the above premise.
You'll do better if you try to crystalize whatever you want to say and find your premise before you begin to write.
Now, who is going to force the characters into action? The honest person may never be troubled by his dishonest friend (to quote our first premise) unless one of the characters forces the issue and in so doing creates conflict. This person would be called the pivotal character. The pivotal character forces the conflict from beginning to end in play, story, or novel. The other characters may be uncertain as to what they want or where they want to go, but the pivotal character knows immediately what he wants.
A selfish person is selfish when the play opens. He is relentlessly selfish. The pivotal character is always relentless. A pivotal character is not motivated by a whim. He has a duty to perform. He must force the conflict to the bitter end, never backing down in the middle of the play or story.
He is relentless because circumstances beyond his control force him to be relentless. If an honest man steals, it is not for the thrill or luxury of it. It is because his family is starving, or perhaps because there is illness. This pressing need for money is a matter of life or death. A man can murder because of a ruthless ambition, desire for revenge, frustration, etc. But whatever the reason, it must be a relentless one.
When the pivotal character stops forcing the conflict, the story ceases too.
The pivotal character usually wishes change. He's dissatisfied. He is militant, ruthlessly militant, whether fighting for or against his status quo.
The pivotal character is the motivating power; he's the cause of conflict in your story or play. If he's ambitious, he won't hesitate to commit blackmail. He must be cunning and ruthless and, if necessary, ready to commit murder in order to achieve his goal, whether his goal is for good or for evil. If he's a good pivotal character, he holds nothing sacred and feels that nothing can stop him from reaching his goal.
If a writer doesn't understand the mechanism of a pivotal character, he won't know in what direction his story is going. The pivotal character knows where he's going, and tries to force everyone to go his way. If the antagonist refuses to go along with him, it's not because the pivotal character didn't push him hard enough. The pivotal character is a stubborn individual who sees only his own goal.
The pivotal character is the heart of all stories, pumping in all the conflict. If he stops pumping, your story or play stops living, just as your body would stop living if the blood-stream were cut off.
I wonder if you can define the difference between a conservative and a reactionary?
The conservative is satisfied with himself, his country, and the world as they are, and wishes to keep them that way; but he's too busy or too lazy to fight for this principle. He feels that everything will come all right in the end.
The reactionary, on the other hand, wishes to keep his life and everything else as is, like the conservative, except that he will go all-out to fight for his principle, and, if necessary, will die for it.
The difference between a liberal and a radical is the same.
The former feels that the world needs a change, but hopes that somehow things will work themselves out in the long run.
The radical, however, instead of wishing or waiting, goes all-out and fights for what he sincerely believes in.
The pivotal character is always on the side of the militant. He is militancy personified. Only great passion makes pivotal characters.
Here are a few examples of pivotal characters:
He wants to take revenge on the man who ran away with his wife.
He wants to take revenge on the man who sent him to prison on a trumped-up charge and took his business away.
He wants to take revenge on the man who ruined his daughter and refused to marry her.
He loves a woman madly but he must make money first to marry her.
He is willing to give his life for his country, which he loves more than anything in this world.
He is willing to be a martyr for his religious belief.
He is greedy. His greediness sprang from poverty, and now he ruthlessly exploits others for fear of hunger.
He is ready to destroy others to achieve his goal.
He may want to be a musician or a scientist or a dancer or an inventor, etc.
Great men are usually outstanding pivotal characters; great criminals also belong in the same category.
The third important factor in writing a story is to look for "character." Who are these people? Where do they come from? What was their childhood like? What is their background? What are their plans in life, their dreams, hopes, ambitions, frustrations, and complexes?
Character is the vital material with which an author must work. Thus, he must know this subject thoroughly. Every object has three dimensions: depth, height, and width.
Human beings have three additional dimensions: physiology, sociology, and psychology.
It is not enough to know that a man is rude, polite, religious, atheistic, moral, or degenerate. We must know why. Why is he any of these things? Why is his character constantly changing, and why must it change whether he wants it to or not?
The first dimension, the physical, covers the appearance and general health of the character. A healthy person reacts differently to things from an unhealthy one. Health makes the difference in his attitude toward life. It may make him tolerant or humble, defiant or arrogant. It affects his mental development, resulting in either an inferiority or a superiority complex.
The general idea that beautiful women are dumb has its foundation in the fact that life has been made easier for them. People are supposed to cater more to beautiful individuals, men or women, which means that they have to exert less ingenuity to attain any object in their favor. A less attractive woman has to work hard for her achievement or accomplishment, which in turn sharpens her mind and molds her into a better person.
The sociology of the character is the second dimension. There is a vast and obvious difference between children born in slums and those born in the lap of luxury.
Environment means home life, marital status of parents, earning power, whether divorced, widowed, compatible, or incompatible. How did the character's friends affect him and how did he affect them. What schooling did he have? What was his attitude in school, his favorite subjects, his special aptitudes? What kind of social life did he lead?
The third dimension, the psychological, is the result of the previous tvo dimensions. This third dimension will give life to ambitions, frustrations, temperaments, attitudes, and complexes of the character.
To understand the actions of an individual we must first find his motivation.
Does a man have large ears, bulging eyes, long, hairy arms? Does he dislike talking about crooked noses, large mouths, thick lips, large feet? Perhaps he does, because he has one of these defects. One person may resign himself to physical handicaps, another pokes fun at them, while a third may be resentful. Many people do not escape the effects of a particular shortcoming. You must know your characters even better than you know yourself.
In a good play each character must serve a purpose. He should be an integral part of the whole structure so that if he is removed, the structure collapses.
How can the author integrate each and every character he selects? Simply by creating a bond between the characters or what is known as a unity of opposites. These people might oppose one another, but they cannot walk out on each other because they are united by a common bond. However, when certain character traits are broken or changed, there is an out.
A wife hates her husband. Why doesn't she divorce him? First, because they have children; second, she is dependent upon him financially. Usually children alone cannot bind the characters together, except when there is an extraordinary love for them. There must be something greater at stake. For instance, money, business, honor, revenge, threatened murder, blackmail, etc.
For our unity of opposites we ask this question: What is the unbreakable bond between the characters? What is so much at stake that they cannot leave each other?
In Hemingway's "The Killers," the unrelenting search for the man they are to kill constitutes the unbreakable bond.
In Maupassant's "The Necklace," vanity is an excellent unity of opposites.
In Jack London's "Making a Fire," the unbreakable bond is the freezing cold against the man's hopeless struggle to live.
In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the mother's unselfish devotion to her children constitutes the necessary bond.
In Hamlet it was revenge for the father's death.
In Othello it was Iago's determination to revenge himself on Othello.
In A Doll's House it was Nora's love for her children and her financial dependency upon her husband. (In Ibsen's time women did not work.)
In Romeo and Juliet it was the title characters' deathless love for each other.
Love, ordinary love, cannot be a good unity of opposites. The love must be great, deep, and death-defying if it is to serve as a strong enough bond. Let us assume the premise of a story to be, "Possessive love leads to isolation." The pivotal character would be the selfish person. Let's make her a mother who, under pretense of sacrifice, tries to ruin her children's lives. She tries to separate them from their spouses because she's jealous of them. She demands her children's constant attention. Her children are bound to her because of loyalty, love, pity (she might be ill or financially dependent upon them), or because they are in the habit of obeying her every whim.
Breaking the bond would come when the children's love has turned to digust, disillusionment, and loss of loyalty. They would finally see through their self-sacrificing mother and leave her all alone, stranded. This is the premise of The Silver Cord.
Everyone needs nourishment in order to grow. In order to have growth in writing, we must feed it with conflict. Conflict results from contradiction. Contradiction is the out-growth of two strong wills, desperately straining against each other. Desperation is an empty phrase unless we understand that it springs from hopelessness.
Frustration grows from disappointment. A tiny bit of frustration might grow into tragedy.
Again, conflict is contradiction. Contradiction, animosity, fear, jealousy, covetousness, hate, and ruthless ambition: these are the ingredients upon which conflict thrives. Just as a person cannot live without sustenance, conflict cannot grow and thrive without our feeding it with troubles and miseries. It is the duty of the writer to feed these human passions generously, if he would later have them work for him. In attempting to rectify one wrong decision we commit another, then commit a third to rectify the second, ad infinitum. Some persons will concede defeat in time to prevent destruction. Others who are stubborn and tenacious will never give up. They'll defy pressing circumstances. They'll carry on against all the laws of organized society. So, for the express purpose of drama, a writer should be interested only in characters who, by their physical and environmental make-up, are predestined to attempt to cut through life like the ancient who cut the Gordian knot with a sword. These characters are reckless people. They burn with a holy zeal. They try to achieve their goal, no matter what the price. However, these ruthless people become desperate only after dire necessity forces them to a decision and any delay in acting might cost them their lives, wealth, health, or honor. Desperate necessity propels these characters toward their ultimate goal, clearly stated in the original premise. Thus, every living character grows only through conflict.
Persons grow and change every second of their lives. Some people grow rapidly, others more slowly. Husbands and wives living together for years may change so gradually it will hardly be noticeable to themselves. But a person who has not seen them for years will be startled by the perceptible changes. Drama is not life itself, but the essence of life. Within the space of two hours' time, we must see tremendous growth in characters. The greater the conflict in human life, the faster and more apparent the growth. Since on the stage a lifetime must be condensed into two hours, the changes must be great.
In a novel, the growth is more measured. The author can take his time. He can follow his characters through the years to the end of their days. However, the characters must still grow. For instance, a selfish person might grow to be generous, a jealous person become trusting, a loyal person turn disloyal. This pole-to-pole growth and how it happens makes the most exciting story in any form.
It is a truism that everything has its opposite. There is no light without a shadow; life is a contradiction to death. Opposition or contradiction exist even in the stars, where an invisible adhesive power called gravitation prevents our pitifully small earth from being smashed into pieces. The same laws govern the invisible atom, where the positron exerts the unifying force amid the positive and negative electrons and protons, while they pull and push each other around like mad dervishes.
Contradiction, the basic principle of life, is manifest also in the creation of the arts. The compositions of the dance are unthinkable without contradiction in movement. The same holds true in painting, where opposing lines and colors create a desired unity. In music, harmony cannot exist without disharmony.
The same law governs all writing. Contradictory characters pitted against one another, such as naive against worldly-wise, evil against just, clash while the all-powerful premise, the equivalent of the positron in the atom, will be the unifying force which will drive the contradictory characters toward their predestined ends. When contradictory characters are unified by the premise, we have orchestration. Without good orchestration, no intelligent composition is possible. We have to be alert and find contradictions everywhere. If we fail to find them, it will not be because they do not exist, but because we failed.
Is there such a thing as injustice? Yes, there is. If you do something against me, that act is unjust. If I do something against you, that act is just. Apparently a third force must exist like the positron and the sun in this case, a judge, to coordinate this seemingly unharmonious contradiction. If there weren't any force to control these contradictions, life would not be possible.
Let us say once again that contradiction is everywhere and in all of us. Nora in A Doll's House is naive, her husband Helmer is worldly-wise.
All good plays, novels, and short stories are based on the same principles:
Taking for granted that these people are militant in their beliefs and bound together by an unbreakable bond, what uproarious comedy or stark tragedy can be produced!
Some plays, novels, even short stories are so slow in starting that they seem as if they will never lead anywhere. We find ourselves so bored that we are ready to toss away the novel or leave the theatre.
The point of attack should start your story. A story and especially a play must open with a crisis which is the sole point of attack in the life or lives of one or more of the characters. A decision must be imminent and the characters must be ready to take action.
A married couple may quarrel bitterly for twenty years. They may threaten to leave each other. The question is: At what point in the lives of this couple would the author start his play? The answer is: When one of them is about to make a decision, or when the point of crisis is reached. Many things may have occurred between these people before we meet them. We are only interested in meeting them when they have reached a crisis in their lives and are about to take a decisive step.
Every short story, novel, and play should start in the middle of the middle. Read The Killers by Hemingway, or the play Born Yesterday by Garson Kanin. If you wish to write a good short story or novel, start on the note of crisis. No law states that you cannot start your story in any other way. But if you want to catch the reader's interest immediately, you had better start with a conflict.
Even people who know little about the mechanics of writing are bored by a static play, a play which has little conflict or spotty conflict.
There are four types of conflict: foreshadowing, static, jumping, and slowly rising.
Foreshadowing conflict should appear at the beginning of the play. Crisis is the hint or the promise of future conflict. In the motion picture Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, almost the entire picture consisted of foreshadowing conflict. The soldiers were training for a mission so dangerous that utmost secrecy was necessary. They weren't even allowed to discuss the mission among themselves. The soldiers' training, that could have been monotonous to watch, proved enrapturing to the audience because of the foreshadowing of the life-or-death mission planted in the very beginning.
In Romeo and Juliet the families were such bitter enemies that even the servants of the respective households were ready to kill each other on sight. What chance did the young lovers have?
When Nora in A Dolrs House naively thinks her husband Helmer will be grateful that she forged her father's signature to save his life, we wait for him to find out, knowing that Helmer is the epitome of honesty and can never forgive.
Future events, future conflicts, must be foreshadowed at the beginning.
In static conflict the conflict remains on an even keel, rising only momentarily. Since life constantly changes and nothing in life is ever static, static conflict is found only in bad writing.
Arguments and quarrels create static conflict, unless the characters are growing and changing during the arguments. Every movement, every line of dialogue must further the action toward the final goal.
In jumping conflict the characters jump from one emotional plane to another, eliminating the necessary transitional steps.
Nature never jumps. A seed planted in the soil one day does not produce a flower the next. During the interval many transitions take place before the plant finally blooms. In the play, the author plants the seeds of his characters' growth, and slowly, step by step, they grow, the changes being witnessed by the spectators.
Static and jumping are the two deadly mistakes of all writing. They must be avoided at all cost.
If you wish to avoid jumping or static conflict you must know in advance what road your characters must travel, for instance:
The above represent two poles, the first the starting point, the second the arrival point. If you master this simple rule you'll have rising conflict throughout your story or play.
Let us suppose that a character is going to travel from love to hate. Let us assume that there are nine emotional steps between the two poles of love and hate:
If a character goes from No. I to No. 4, this constitutes jumping conflict. The author has neglected to show transitional steps Nos. 2 and 3. If the character then goes from No.4 to No. 6, this is again jumping, because step No. 5 has been left out.
In real life a person may go through emotional changes in lightning-like fashion, so much so that his decision seems jumpy or hasty. This is not so. He has really gone through all the transitional steps, but so rapidly that it is not apparent. In fiction every step must be obvious and clearly shown.
When each character goes through each step, No. 1 to No. Io, then we have slowly rising conflict. Remember that each step must be higher than the succeeding one, just as each act gathers more momentum than the one before until the final curtain is reached.
10, 11, 12. CRISIS, CLIMAX, RESOLUTION
A play or story from beginning to end is a series of crises, climaxes, and resolutions. It begins with a crisis and builds up from there.
The crisis is a turning point, a time when a change is imminent. For example, in childbirth the birth pains are the crisis, the birth is the climax, and the resolution is life or death.
Do you remember the play Rope's End, by Patrick Hamilton? Two rich young men murder their schoolmate for the thrill and experience. As the curtain rises, they, the killers, are seen stuffing the murdered youth into a large chest. They invite the murdered youth's father in for a discussion in order to experience the thrill and danger that his visit will produce.
The play starts with a crisis, as all plays and all good fiction writing should. A crisis is an unknown quantity, a turning point.
As the conflict in a play rises to meet each new crisis, climax, and resolution, the author keeps building for the final crisis, climax, and resolution, which will be the sum total of all the other crises, climaxes, and resolutions, proving the premise.
The first crisis is a minor one and proceeds to the second and third till it arrives at the greatest and final crisis.
If each succeeding crisis does not rise on an ascending scale, the conflict becomes static.
The final crisis, climax, and resolution can follow each other in rapid order at the end of the play, or an interval can exist between them. In A Doll's House almost all of the third act constitutes resolution, as Nora explains to Helmer why she cannot remain. Even this resolution keeps transcending until the proud Helmer begs her forgiveness and begs Nora to stay. At this time a new crisis is created. Her refusal is the climax, and her departure the resolution.
The same principles apply to short stories and novels. While a short story consists of only one or two episodes, a novel may have hundreds, one after the other.
In a short stery the tempo marches quickly, while in the novel it ambles along. But crisis, climax, and resolution are at work on the same general principle found in playwriting.