Writing: How theme suggests what characters to use · 8:30pm Dec 21st, 2016
I was listening to the free Dramatica videos. Dramatica theory says that a story is an argument, and the characters represent different views on the argument. Melanie Phillips said in videos 33-35 that each argument has several necessary components which should each be represented by a character. This reminded me of my recent Rogue One review.
Star Wars is a coming-of-age story (lit crits call that a "Bildungsroman"), but it's also about faith. A story about gaining or keeping faith, Phillips said, must have someone represent its opposite, skepticism. Han Solo represents skepticism in Star Wars. Faith can't really exist without the possibility of doubt. The theme of Luke gaining faith probably dictates that Han Solo must return to help the rebels in the end, to show that side of the argument concedes the point.
But the full Western notion of faith is religious. Faith was a common theme in medieval stories, even though most of the time it was literally against the law for Christians to express doubt. So the people in these stories seldom doubt that God exists, or that Christianity is true. "Faith" then meant something closer to "obedience" or "trust". King Arthur, when dying, told Sir Bedivere to throw Excalibur into the lake it had come from. Bedivere twice lied and said he had. This is a crisis of faith, but not of belief. Arthur doesn't try to convince Bedivere of the reality of the Lady of the Lake, or even tell him about her. He just tells him to obey.
Philips said the full concept of "faith" isn't present without another component: temptation. In Star Wars, temptation is represented by Darth Vader, who believes in the force, but tempts Luke to use it wrongly.
So once you've decided a story is to be about your protagonist learning to have faith, you probably want another character who represents doubt, and a third who represents temptation.
What other stories do we know about faith? Maybe The Exorcist. This movie is probably about Father Karras's crisis of faith. Karras' doubt is so strong at first that instead of another skeptical character, we need a faith figure, and that's Father Merrin. Karras is the doubter. The demon is the tempter. Merrin stands firm in his faith, and Karras changes from doubter to believer, and demonstrates full faith--meaning not just belief, but also obedience--when he throws himself out the window. (This demonstrates another principle of Dramatica theory, which is that if two central characters are directly opposed, one of them should usually stand firm or win, while the other changes her mind or loses. Phillips cautions that this is because Dramatica is designed to produce Hollywood movies, not all possible kinds of stories.)
I can try to imagine what characters other central themes require. (It's probably in the rest of the Dramatica videos, but I haven't listened to them.) A story about a boy coming of age, for instance, probably needs a father figure, and maybe also a bad father, a bad example.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are both about coming of age and the renunciation of power. For the coming of age theme, we need (maybe) a good role model and a bad role model. I guess Gandalf (or Elrond?) and Gollum are the good and bad father in both cases. When Gollum had the choice Bilbo or Frodo do, he did the wrong thing. For the renunciation theme, we need again a tempter, but not a father-figure tempter who's made the bad decision in the distant past, but someone arguing to make the bad decision right now. In The Hobbit that's Thorin, and in LOTR it's at least Boromir.
(I doubt that the father figure has to be male. Galadriel could be a father figure.)
Raiders of the Lost Ark is about faith and a kind of renunciation, about Indy learning to believe in the power of God, and to place people above things (see my blog about Raiders). Indy is the skeptic. Belloq and the Nazis are tempters, for both the faith and renunciation theme. Both believe in God, but hope to use Him for their own purposes. Both put the Ark above people.
Is there a faith figure? Perhaps Sallah. He's the only other main character except for Marion, and he appears in the middle act of the script, and right away states his faith:
SALLAH
It is the Ark. If it is there, at Tanis... It is not something man was meant to disturb... Death has always surrounded it. It is not of this earth.
He stays in the movie up until just shortly before Indy's "baptism" in the ocean and "leap of faith" during the dark night of his soul, after which point Sallah's faith isn't needed anymore:
134 EXT. THE PERISCOPE - NIGHT
Indy looks through barely open eyes at the sharks running alongside. There is nothing to be done. His eyes close.
Then again, Belloq also seems like a bad father figure. It's important to watch out for a theory that is too general--that would work for any theme, even ones that a story doesn't have. Also, what role does Marion play? She seems to function as the reward, not as part of the argument. If that's correct, then we've just accounted for all of main characters and left no roles unfilled.
This idea that you need a character for each critical viewpoint seems to be useful. Can you think of other examples of faith, coming-of-age, or renunciation stories, and do they have the prescribed characters? Can you list some other themes and the viewpoints we need to argue each fairly?
I'm sure that she is in some way.
Relevant to this topic: Appletheosis.
You are just blogging left, right and center, eh?
the theory has some truth to it, but seems clumsy to me. it does sound like the kind of recipe Hollywood would easily misuse, creating characters who are just strawman counter-arguments for the protagonist to resist.
in the example of Star Wars, I see it as equally being about Han Solo's character arc. Luke searches for faith to believe in ( himself / Zen Buddhism / midichlorians / whatever the Force is supposed to be ), while Han is the cowardly mercenary who wants to be the courageous hero. so then all the other characters must have been simultaneously designed to represent arguments for Han's courage -- Luke is idealism, Ben is pacifism, Vader is... something I can't think of. By adding more themes, the characters have more dimensions and no longer represent just one argument.
it's very likely Lucas intended these themes, but I'm skeptical that he started from this same point like in Dramatica's theory. maybe it's better designed to analyse and write papers about stories (focusing on one theme), rather than how to construct them as a writer.
In a story with a large enough cast of characters, which Star Wars and LOTR certainly are, It wouldn't be hard at all to wrangle an argument that any role you care to define is filled by a character, at least in some shade of meaning. Maybe this falls out as something successful stories do, and I can see it being a useful thing for analyzing a story, but I'm not sure how useful it would be in planning a story. You could, if you wanted to be very procedural about it, but it's also the kind of thing I bet an astute writer (or reader) will intuit by there just being a feeling that something's missing.
Edit: and now I realize I said a lot of the same things as hazey.
Hm. I can only be introspective on my own stuff, but I'll try.
Up: Both a Faith and a Coming of Age story. The old man starts his journey with one intention: To complete the trip he and his wife had planned before she passed away, with a subtext that he expects to die in the process (Faith). Add the young boy and his story turns to attempting to get the kid to safety and live in the process (CoA).
I think the BEST faith movie was Big Jake. The primary goal is for John Wayne to retrieve his grandson, but a subtext (and explicitly Told by Maureen O'Hara) is that the people responsible for the attack and kidnapping be killed as an example. It also gave John Wayne one of his best lines ever.
Back to ponies. For a Crisis of Faith, you would be hard-put to come up with better than Skywriter's second chapter of The First Time You See Her with Sister Kale. The Princess-Goddess of Reduit has been sent into a premature growth spurt by Kale's accidental actions, and she must strive far more than she has ever before in order to once again bring peace to the Abby of Song, for her goddess is hungry, and cries through the night. And it's all her fault.
I think the closest I've got to a good story being an argument is Buggy and the Beast. Beet Salad is determined to make just one spark of light in his dark world by saving an injured animal. The 'animal' in question is a critically-injured (and dying) changeling who is used to being treated like a disposable asset by the hive and a disgusting enemy by ponies, and who expects to die but does *not* expect to be accepted (even grudgingly) by a bitter pony who seems to hate everything. It's two unlikable main characters in conflict, which was *much* harder to write than two likable characters. (build those writing muscles)
4349828
4349944
I'm a huge fan of the Dramatica theory. I'm excited to see writers I really like learning about it and figuring out how to implement it into their stories and their analysis of other stories. Just... keep in mind Bad Horse is still learning. If the theory seems like it doesn't work right based on Bad Horse's understanding of it... don't hold that against it?
I don't know what I'm trying to say here. Just... Dramatica is really cool, so if you'd like to learn more, PM me or check out my blog posts about it. Better yet, go check out the site itself!
While I don't like to dismiss various overarching 'theories of literature' out of hand, to me this sort of rules-based interpretation feels like someone with a hammer searching for nails. :/
I mean, is the author dead or not? Do I get to decide what the theme is, what the work means to me? if so, does each character represent a different part of a different argument for each reader? If so, why should I care about this, because if I'm arguing with myself, won't I just decide whatever I want anyways, making this arbitrary and meaningless? If not, what makes one interpretation more valid than the others? Since arguments are logical, do all stories need to be logical? Are stories that are 'bad arguments' also 'bad stories'? At what point does this stop being worth arguing about?
This particular idea does seem interesting to me, though. I think stories are, structurally, bottom-up creations; the things on the top are dependent and supported by the things below them. Theme, as one of the top things, is shaped by everything under it, but isn't shaped by much itself, which makes it a prime candidate for being picked arbitrarily. OTOH, since it doesn't actually influence much of anything, you don't narrow down your choices much by picking a theme; this probably works best for writing if most of the story has already been decided on, so some characters can be tweaked in light of the theme.
4350540
Well, that's Bad Horse for you. For me, the most important thing is to be able to switch off that stuff and write.
Much like the apparently serious question 'can popular art be great?' it raises the question, 'can you write great things (or anything, really) from a position of deep deconstructing analysis?'. I think the answer's clearly no: writing is constructing, so it's a non-starter.
And yet, there's problems with being the totally naive creator… if you ask the critics. Seems like the totally naive creators have a fine time getting popular despite their many obvious blind spots.
The only solution I've ever found is to study and learn all the technical and critical stuff, plan with it, and then drop it all in the mud upon beginning to write. This risks letting the writing veer wildly away from the thoughtful plan, and that's frightening when you seek mastery by analyzing everything. Yet, I feel those moments can be the most powerful… and even the most critically important.
T. S. Eliot was a noted, insightful critic, in just such a mode of analyzing and comprehending patterns and purposes.
It's garbage, insignificant… compared to the less controlled emanations of his poetry. Count the echoes of 'Prufrock' alone, and feel the force of meaning it expresses.
Abandon this Bad Horse path. It leads only to itself.
I'm with 4350540 on this one. The moment someone says something is necessary then the idea is up for critical evaluation, and in this case this proves patently false. It's just one way of telling a story, and selling it as more than that earns a great deal of scorn from me. Then again, maybe this is why so many Hollywood films are turgid crap these days, huh?
Even without a critical analysis, though, I still thought the idea sounded dodgy. Surely this is just overcomplicating the search for conflict?
4350540 I disagree strongly with everything you said.
The author is not dead, and you don't get to decide what the theme is. That's a popular but incorrect idea, created by people who've never written a story, have no idea how much the author contributes to the story's meaning, and want to make themselves appear more important.
You get to pick between similar closely-related themes, or to invert the theme, or in other ways to find a variation of it. Sometimes you can find a new theme. But the reader has nothing like the blank page that the author faced.
Meaning is information. Information means a restriction of possibilities. If we take a blank page and measure the number of bits of information it would take to specify a story, it's very large. If we take that written story and specify the number of bits it takes to go from that story to any one reader's interpretation of it, it will be much smaller. That means the author contributes most of the meaning.
Another statement I disagree with strongly. It might not feel like the theme influences much, but that's either because you unconsciously knew what the theme was, and already wrote it into the story before realizing what the theme was, or because you wrote something for the New Yorker that has no theme and that I probably don't want to read.
The thing I've always liked:
About writing stories is the way that it isn't an argument. Because I really, really, really dislike getting into arguments. Heck, I dislike having opinions and try to hold as few of them as I can manage.
But the idea of "story as argument" makes me think this might be the first actual difference I've seen between writing stories for a site like Fimfiction and writing stories for professional publication. When I write for a paying market, I have an audience of exactly two people: myself and the editor at the magazine or publishing house. I get the story into a state where I think it works, then I send it to the editor. If the editor likes it, I get a "yes" and a check or e-mail from Paypal. If the editor doesn't like it, I get a "no" and a chance to send the story to the next editor on my list. There's no argument at all: that's why they call the process "submission," I've always thought.
On Fimfiction, though, once I get the story into a state where I think it works, I post it, and that's when the arguments start. It's gotten to the point where I've pretty much decided to only post stories after 11PM here on the Pacific coast so they'll hopefully work their way off the front page before most of the site's users have a chance to see them. The people who are already following me will get a notifications that I've put up a new story, but no one else'll be bothered by it. I might even post my next one before I get the cover art since your post a few days ago seems to show that random folks are less likely to be attracted to a story with no artwork
Mike
4350979 It doesn't mean an argument as in a contentious discussion; it means an argument as in a piece of rhetorical reasoning. The idea is that a story presents an opinion. I argued (but not, I hope argumentatively) for this same view in some of my early blog posts.
4350540
To add a bit (I think?) to what 4350890 said...
Nearly every story is going to be a conflict between (at least) two ideas, which will spill out into physical, verbal, or emotional conflict. Even if those ideas are "<character> should die" vs. "<character> should remain alive," as might be the case in a "man vs. nature" story. Even if the conflicting ideas are held by the same character.
Those ideas contain your theme. You might not recognize the theme of what you're writing in the words an English student would use to summarize it, but you obviously recognize your central conflict, and why it's a conflict, and how you want to resolve it. As you decide those things you're deciding your theme, so it can't really be picked arbitrarily, though you can end up saying something you don't really agree with if you aren't paying attention.
To then work into where (I think?) Dramatica is coming from, your story must be an argument for your ending, even without recognizing a thematic argument. It has to show how we logically arrived at this conclusion, and why it makes sense in this situation. If your conflict and resolution define your theme, then the conclusion of your story is the conclusion you're drawing for your thematic argument.
To that end, I agree with people who are suggesting that these "characters to take sides in an argument" happen naturally, and/or are more read in after the fact, because I think there are other things besides individual characters that can easily take their place as elements of the argument, like events, locations, and symbols. They're simply the things that your protagonist has to be exposed to or react to for the ending to make sense.
(Edit: To take the Star Wars example, Luke has to be exposed to a source of skepticism and a source of faith for there to be a conflict. If one side or the other was ignored, the story would fall flat. But those don't have to be characters: Han could be replaced with a series of events where the Force failed Luke, or Obi-Wan could be replaced with a location or object that reaffirmed his faith through the strength of the Force, and the conflict would still be there so the ending, theme, and argument would still work.)
The important thing is that the end of the story feels like the logical conclusion to the events of the story. If you take care of that, the argument has written itself without working backwards.
I think.
4350979:
4351014:
Maybe I've just been hanging out with the wrong people my entire life, but every time I've been exposed to "a piece of rhetorical reasoning," it has quickly become "a contentious discussion." That's the reason I got out of grad. school: as near as I could tell, the whole idea behind writing a thesis was to take someone else's idea and show how it was wrong. I felt less than comfortable trying to do that, so I took what they call "a terminal Master's" and devoted my time to writing little talking animal stories instead.
Mike Again
4350890 Death of the author, as I understand it, is a discussion on what's more important to think about: what the author intended to put in, or what the reader got out.
I've never claimed the author doesn't write information into the story. However, what's written and what's understood can be different things. Authors obviously contribute to the meaning, but claiming the readers should be passive receptacles and not filter the information through their own lens of experience and understanding seems like a silly position to take.
Knowing what the author intended is at best a gamble, and usually impossible. Even if a perfect explanation of intent is available, and I trust it... should I believe every story perfectly reflects author intent? Anyone who claims that hasn't written a story. On the other hand, I have intimate knowledge of what I got out.
So which is more important?
The decision seems easy to me: any author that claims their intent should over-rule my interpretation doesn't really understand how communication works. They're the sort who end up crying 'no-one understands my genius!' when they write a steaming pile of crap that was awesome in their head. They can put in whatever information they want, but my reading happens on my own terms, and they have no guarantee on how I'll understand it.
You seem to acknowledge that readers can get things out of the story that the author never intended:
If my understanding somehow differs from the author's intent, does that invalidate my experience? Is a discovered theme less important, real, or valuable than themes the author intended? What if I miss something the author intended, and that changes parts of his work? Am I responsible, or him?
Discovered or lost themes are just one example. If they're allowed, this means people can claim they got something out of a story that's opposite to what I intended when I wrote it. But... this isn't a problem for me, because I value other people being different from me and thinking differently than me. This isn't the same as claiming a story is a blank page. Rather, it's claiming that 'reading a story' is different from 'a transfer of information'. We're not robots, and writing isn't math or physics, where we transmit facts one-to-one; readers don't just 'receive information', they interact with it. They infer, guess, and read between the lines. That means things are fuzzy, indistinct, and open to interpretation. And I don't think that's going to stop, no matter how many people wish it would.
You think people who argue for death of the author have never written anything? I think people who argue against it have never really read anything.
On theme:
This is precisely what I'm talking about. Theme doesn't determine the content of the story; rather, the content of the story determines the theme. Themes don't exist on their own in some nebulous way, floating around free of information content; they're tied to specific words in the story. You can't have theme disconnected from content, but you can have content disconnected from theme (at least, if you write for the New Yorker.) Changing the theme requires changing the content, but different content with the same theme is common. So, I say picking a theme doesn't determine or limit your content much, but creating a significant amount of content can easily limit or determine the theme. That's why I think picking the theme before you've got enough content ideas is silly; it doesn't limit you much, so it's not useful. I mean, you can do it, but I don't think it's helpful to the writing process.
4351021
Yes, this. I don't believe such arguments can be constructed out of whole cloth. They arise when characters have intentionality, and then the author's good enough to set this intention against legitimate opposition. The kind of opposition gives you your theme, and if you can make a good villain or good opposition, you've already got forces that can't understand or tolerate each other. As they pursue that, the specific arguments become clear.
LOTR is about battles and dragons and it's also about how people strive for power and what they intend to do with it, and what these intentions do to them. So, demented father-figure analogies aside, Gandalf is the 'ultimate trustworthy benevolent power' figure, Sauron is of course the ultimate evil power, Saruman is much like the Dwarves ('delved too greedily and too deep'! A recurring theme) and Gollum is the ultimate creature totally consumed by lust for power, impotent to act on it, but unable to rest. He's possessed.
As such they embody arguments about the use and abuse of power: Tolkien in wartime was very caught up in this, and in his Catholicism he came prepared with opinions on God and the Devil which naturally shaped his creative output. There is no argument that the Devil-figure in Tolkien should prevail: indeed he doesn't, though he is a terrible danger. But the nature of Sauron is a form of argument about power and deity, and it's important to Tolkien that he not be a paper tiger, because that's the argument: Tolkien's Sauron is real and dangerous, in his argument.
However, he doesn't arbitrarily decide to make such a villain: it emerges from his writerly (and Catholic) heart, and it composes an argument that he takes personally. I think if you suggested to Tolkien that he should try to make Sauron more relatable, he'd have been astonished. That is not what Sauron was for, and it didn't wait upon the deciding of literary arguments.
4351309
now I'M offended
4351309
I don't understand. More important for whom to think about? If it's the reader, then it isn't very helpful or informative to say that it's more important for the reader to think about what the reader thinks. It's tautological.
Which is why nobody has ever taken that position. Perhaps you should read "Death of the Author". It's not very long. It contains gems such as
The point of "Death of the Author" is not so much that the reader's interpretation is important, as that nothing is original, and all stories are just pieces of other stories shuffled around in a new order, so it's deceiving to call someone an "author", or even to keep track of who wrote what. The real point of DotA, I'd say, is that Barthes wants to replace aesthetics with medieval aesthetics and philosophy, which said that humans couldn't create anything new, but merely rearrange copies from nature. This is a necessary part of revitalizing Platonism, which is central to post-modernism.
That's not really relevant to the question of who provided more of the meaning present in the story. Knowing most of what the author intended is necessary. Is that character Rainbow Dash or Mack the Knife? Is this story taking place in Ponyville, or Berlin? All of that counts. If you're going to skim off the most recondite points of theme and say, "This is all that counts as authorial intent," then maybe it would make some sense to say the reader's meditations on the story provided more information, but that isn't how intention works. Everything is part of the author's intention, from the color of the sky to the size of the houses.
Yes. I've always acknowledged that, as has everyone, except for the caricatures of their opponents drawn by the reader-response theorists.
Certainly not. You're making a motte-and-bailey argument, where you make these vast, sweeping claims, and then when someone challenges you on them, you retreat and pretend you're making tiny, modest claims. You originally wrote,
Here, you claimed that the reader "gets to decide what the theme is", and that each reader can see some completely arbitrary different argument, and you also claimed that the default assumption should be that no interpretation is more valid than any other. This isn't saying that the reader has some interpretive freedom; it completely denies the author any input into the process. You are taking the extremist position here, yet all you've done in response is to pretend that I'm the extremist.
4351585 ...are you a robot, too?
4351021
Yes! I think so. I think these viewpoints get expressed in characters in movies because movies don't have omniscient POV. In the 19th century, you'd just tell your reader what everybody thought, and you could describe the main character's inner arguments. You can't do that in a movie; it's invisible. You have to externalize it, into events or characters.
4351517
I think you're right that writers often "do things right" by instinct, if that's what you mean, but you're picking a uniquely poor example in Tolkien and Sauron. Sauron is copied from Satan. To quote Randel Helms:
Tolkien is an interesting example to bring up re. intertextuality, because, like Shakespeare, he copied everything and everybody--all the characters, places, and plot events--from somewhere else. People have gone thru his works and said "these names are all taken from the town he lived in after the War, this character is from Beowulf, this plot twist is from the Battle of Maldon, this event is copied from Beowulf." And when he wrote LOTR, it was plot-wise a close copy of The Hobbit. But, like Shakespeare, he changed everything in significant and deliberate ways. It's almost textbook intertextuality, except that Tolkien was reworking his own text. This destroys the post-modern account of intertextuality, which has a kind of Marxist base to it that assumes each author is predetermined to rewrite texts according to his or her class interests and has no actual originality or thought process that need be considered.
If you want to use Tolkien as an example of an author who didn't really intend all the things that emerged from his stories, though, I think you're really barking up the wrong tree. Tolkien obsessed for years over how to change The Hobbit into LOTR and retell the story to focus on different messages, writing articles and giving lectures along the way about how mythology should work and so on. He was a very conscious author.
Er. Actually I think I'm not understanding what you meant. I don't know why you brought up relatability.
4351626
I was programmed to be a hypocrite.
4349944
I think a big part of building theories of literature is understanding on what principles our intuition is working. Intuition is useful, but understanding why you are thinking the way you're thinking and designing a story the way you're designing it is helpful.
I don't think there's any one true way to build a story, but thinking about models like this can be helpful, both to people trying to build up their own intuition, to understand how other stories are working, as well as to see whether or not adding something else in might help the story you're planning to work better.
4349828
I think slavishly adhering to any theory of literature is dangerous because it can cut off better routes for your stories to take. The Hero With A Thousand Faces is an interesting observation, for instance, but not a prescription for writing stories; trying to construct your story around that skeleton can lead to it feeling samey.
This is a problem with a lot of modern Hollywood superhero films, TBH. But even if you have the same plot skeleton, it can still be freshened up - Deadpool, for instance, is a fairly "standard" superhero story in a sense, but the middle is told first, the beginning second, and then the end last, with the mix between past and present letting us get to know Deadpool better, infusing humor into the more serious parts of the story (like him having cancer and grappling with that), and just general joy at watching Deadpool be Deadpool, reminding us constantly why we're on the ride with this schmuck. Deadpool would not have been as good if it didn't start off with Deadpool as Deadpool.
4351642
4351517 was saying that Tolkien never set out to use Sauron, for example, as a piece in an argument. He set out to write a story that reflected the world he lived in in the ways he thought about it.
In doing so, he had to represent what he saw as the challenges in the world, and he had to represent them honestly (even if he borrowed those representations left, right, and center.) Evil had to have strength and be legitimate tempting, or the story would not only fall flat, but it wouldn't represent the evil he saw as a force in the world.
And because he did those things, he ended up with strong thematic arguments.
I don't know enough to know this is true, personally, but that was Jinx's point.
If it is the case, or in the case of other authors, in order to not do that they would have to not understand or misrepresent the world they see. I suppose if someone is in danger of that, thinking in terms of "sides of an argument" might be a good way for them to check. Though I don't know how much it might help, since they're probably starting from an extremely biased point of view.
4351236
Yeah, discussions and arguments are not the same as screaming matches.
The former can formal, calm, and usually have few or no long lasting effect on relationships, the latter is just exhausting and annoying.