How to Develop Page 13
The first two of the following four examples show storyline changes based on some alterations in Rumpelstiltskin’s character. The third example demonstrates how easy it is to alter the story when you change an important aspect of another of the story’s characters. The fourth example looks at the results of some character changes for children’s stories.
EXAMPLE 1
Our Diane character from the short story is a talented but not-so-experienced scientist and our Rumpelstiltskin a talented and very experienced one. A retiring scientist has boasted that he is on the edge of a breakthrough in his research, so the boss hands his work over to the newly employed scientist, the Diane character, assuming that she will now successfully complete the breakthrough. The boss can make threats regarding her possible failure at the work. But she finds out that no potential breakthrough occurred; it was just the idle boast of a retiring scientist. What does she do now?
Our Rumpelstiltskin helps our Diane character by attempting to make this breakthrough for real, but the results are mixed in quality. He is a bit of a dreamer and a blunderer. His early attempts are disastrous failures, but he persuades her to let him continue, insisting that the results will improve. So we have a rising plot arc whereby our hapless Diane character is biting her nails hoping the work will turn out fine.
Attempts at improving the work can be full of humour. These might involve some sort of mechanical experimentation or the development of some new super glue. In the second attempt, our Rumpelstiltskin is so persuaded that the glue works that he stands under something heavy that the glue holds to the wall. The heavy object falls on his head. He never considered that the high room temperature would weaken the glue, for example.
After our Rumpelstiltskin messes things up the second time, he asks for something big from the Diane character as a reward for helping her out but only if he gets it right next time. By now she is persuaded he is unlikely to get it right and feels sorry for him because of the heavy object falling on his head and so she agrees to his request. The third attempt is a success and the Diane character hands the results over to the boss who is pleased with it. Then she has to give the Rumpelstiltskin character what she agreed to give him. Or does she? What happens next?
EXAMPLE 2
Here our Rumpelstiltskin is very sly, cunning and narcissistic. A boss orders someone to do extra work with which they struggle. Our Rumpelstiltskin steps in, agrees to do the work for a price, but passes it instead to a third party, one he’s been manipulating for a while. The first person doesn’t know the other is doing their work. Once the first person gets the finished work and is praised by the boss for it, our Rumpelstiltskin is soon manipulating them into doing what they didn’t agree to. How extreme this manipulation might be will depend on how much the original work meant to the victim and how well our Rumpelstiltskin can exploit the situation to get them to fulfil his demands. He is now playing two people at the same time. Possibly, he’s using others, too, only we must concentrate on two of them. This first person decides to fight back after discovering that the person who really tackled their work was forced into it. The plot revolves around the latest victim trying to get the upper hand against our Rumpelstiltskin. She might be manipulated into carrying out work for him continuously, and therein she may well find a means of laying a trap for him. The POV might be from the exploited character, or it might even be from the Rumpelstiltskin character.
EXAMPLE 3
Our talented Rumpelstiltskin is a nice man who helps out people in trouble and has no agenda in doing so. But our Diane character from the short story, the princess in the fairy tale, is a nasty person who figures on getting our Rumpelstiltskin fired so she will never have to feel indebted to him and never have to worry about him spilling the beans about what he’s done to help her. The inciting incident is where our Rumpelstiltskin’s boss admonishes him for a mistake he didn’t make. Maybe he gets demoted and threatened with loss of his job if he messes up a second time. Our hero reflects on what went wrong and eventually realizes his colleague has set him up for a fall. The Diane character attempts to set him up again, and, of course, he must outwit her at some point.
Another slight spin on this story could be that two people are set a project together and one does all the work because the other is useless or lazy or both, and the useless one sets about taking all credit for the work (sounds like real life). But in order to do this successfully he must discredit the other. Then the other, once discredited, has to right the wrong done to her.
IDEAS FOR A CHILDREN’S STORY
Considering the link the fairy tale has nowadays with children’s literature, it seems only fair to take a quick look at some possible ideas for this age group working off the character changes.
The story might be set in a school with a child, teacher, parent, secretary or a member of the catering or house staff as our Rumpelstiltskin character. A mother may be boasting of her child’s excellence and a teacher then loads the child with extra homework and threatens her with detention if she fails to do it. Or, in the staffroom, a teacher might brag about the cleverness of his favourite pupil. A second teacher, who doesn’t like the first one, and is fed up listening to him boasting about his favourite pupil, decides to overload the child with homework in his subject just to teach the first teacher a lesson. The poor child is caught in the middle of this feud. When the first teacher finds out what is happening and realizes he’s made this child’s life a misery in school, he might attempt to undo this injustice. Does he step in and attempt to help the child with his homework, a subject outside of his expertise? Will the second teacher mock the child’s homework in front of other teaching staff, not realizing that the first teacher has helped with it? Or will the homework be so good that this teacher gives the child an even harder assignment to do? What then happens? The first teacher might be a combination of Rumpelstiltskin and the father in the fairy tale. The child is the equivalent of the Diane character in the short story and will need to help solve his or her own problems. The story can be serious, humorous or descend into farce.
This one is a spin on example 2 above. What if our Rumpelstiltskin is a very clever, cunning and wicked child who does other children’s work and improves their overall grades? But once he has them hooked on enjoying good grades, he starts to make outrageous demands. He can even control the class through the class bully. The bully’s grades are good because our Rumpelstiltskin is voluntarily doing his work but in turn he is manipulating the bully into doing his bidding for him, which includes beating up children who step out of line. The plot and POV will revolve around one bullied child in particular who will resolve the problem.
PITCH
When writing any story, pitch is important. It is very important to use the correct pitch if you work closely off a fairy tale. Pitch involves the perspective and mood that the writer brings to bear on the work, and encompasses every aspect of the story. It relates to the way the whole story comes off. Is the story trying to be serious? If the characters seem ridiculous, is this likely to work? Is the story trying to be light and humorous? Will this work with description and character better suited to a thriller?
Single Knock has credibility because it is underpinned by an easy sense of humour. This means the reader knows that the oddities are to be enjoyed as a bit of tongue-in-cheek. But a slight shift in pitch and the reader might think the story should be taken as a dead serious piece. Then the reader could well question the oddities of the story and ask themselves: is this likely to ever happen? Is Dominic for real, especially with his desire for the cat? The story’s credibility would now be hanging by a thread. It would be a pity not to understand this because the beauty of using the fairy tale as inspiration and guide for a modern story is that it will very likely throw up many such odd characters and situations that otherwise we would never have ever thought about, but that we will want to use in a toned-down and credible version. So, if we keep as loyally as possible to the old tale for inspiration and guidance, as
we did with Single Knock, it isn’t just about stripping away the obvious magic and enchantment and fantastic oddities of character of the original that we need to concentrate on; we must also think about getting the pitch right.
SUMMING UP
The fairy tale is a great means of inspiration and guidance for the modern short story, as well as for the creation of sayings and fables out of the tale’s theme. It can especially inspire and guide our story with character, plot, theme and situation. Our goal is to take the fairy tale’s best attributes (from our perspective) and combine them with the short story’s best attributes so as to produce an imaginative and credible piece of work. In particular, we want to update and deepen the original character, modernize the setting and strip away the obvious magic and enchantment, but while attempting to retain the freshness and quirkiness of both character and situation of the old tale. Of course, it is also important that we endeavour to keep our story credible by using the right pitch.
CHAPTER 6
The historical narrative
First we will discover why the historical narrative offers a great deal of inspiration and guidance for short story ideas. Then we will look at a technique for mining relevant material from the vast expanse and depth of the historical narrative; and after that produce an essay using just this sort of material. This written essay will be analysed for its storytelling elements just as we have done with the source literature in previous chapters. A short story plan based on our analysis will follow and then an historical short story of 1,150 words. Next comes a saying and two fables, an old style and a modern style one, all inspired by a theme in the essay (not the short story), just as earlier sayings and fables were inspired by the source literature. We will write an early draft plan for a modern story inspired in particular by one of the fables. Finally, we will give this technique for mining relevant material some flexibility in its application and discover how this affects the way we are able to develop historical storylines.
WHY SHOULD WE LOOK AT HISTORY?
The study of history is a study of the human condition on both an individual and a collective level (social, cultural, political, for example) and within a setting unlike our own by default of it being situated in the past. Although people hundreds of years ago were very different to us, as they lived under very different conditions by comparison to our own time, we are still able to connect to them in certain key ways because the human condition runs through all people, at all times, and in all places. So history allows us to make close studies of real people under circumstances quite different to anything we are likely to experience but to which we can relate because inherently they share similar personality attributes with us. This is why the fable (Chapter 3), written thousands of years ago, still connects with us today. The fable’s theme involves human flaws and these fundamentally remain unchanged.
The historical narrative is brimming with exotic characters and epic storylines, and we read about them for the same psychological reasons we read the novel, except the difference is that in history it really happened. Though we want to know all about the castles, specifics about the religion, costumes, etc. – the bricks and mortar that build up the architecture of the story – the most fascinating aspects of the tale are the inhabitants of this architecture. We are curious to know how people coped with the limitations and conflicts of their world. One of the main reasons we are curious is because we cannot help but wonder how we ourselves might have behaved under the same set of circumstances, under the same architectural roof. This is fundamentally why we read the novel and follow the main characters: to see how they handle the tough assault course of the plot in their own world; and consciously, or unconsciously, we wonder how we would have coped by comparison.
The fiction writer who reads history develops a deep understanding of why people behave in certain ways on both an individual and a group level. The reader comes to understand how cause and effect works on both an individual and on an epic level, so that they can go on to use this knowledge to help them map their own work. The reader discovers how people were held in check in their day by social, cultural, moral, religious, military and economic forces. This applied to everyone, of course, including the most powerful individuals. The reader comes to understand in great detail the different interrelated strands that held past societies together.
Studies of history enable the fiction writer to develop story depth because history offers a wide range of original, reality-based blueprints for doing just that. The historical novelist uses these resources as a matter of course, but writers of other genres also mine this rich source. There is no reason why the short story writer cannot do so, too.
A TECHNIQUE FOR MINING THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
Whether we want to write an historical short story using real or imagined historical character and setting or whether we want to use the historical text to help us find character and ideas for stories that are unrelated to the historical setting, it is useful to master a technique for this task as the historical narrative is so vast with its big plots, panoramic settings and multiple characters and the short story so small in its scope that it is otherwise difficult to know where to begin looking for these ideas. This section will show us a way of doing so.
Although the mining technique is going to be used to help us write an essay, we will obviously also be thinking of what sort of story we are aiming for, so that the essay will end up reflecting most, if not all, of our story’s needs. The essay acts as a focal point into which we draw all our necessary character, plot and storyline from the broad historical narrative in order that we may study and analyse it just as we have done with the pieces of source material in the previous chapters. If relevant details of history or storytelling elements are missing then it may well affect the quality of our short story. This is a good reason to become very familiar with the historical period in question.
Even though historians and historical novelists often make their accounts personal, highlighting for us the grand stage from a particular and narrow set of characters, these are still usually big stories with multiple characters in play, multiple plot strands, a spread of time, setting and themes suitable for big narratives. So it is still difficult to spot a short story idea amongst all of that. Yet it is obvious that we must focus on particular and narrow aspects of the historical narrative for our short story ideas. What are they? What are we looking for? How do we go about finding them?
Let’s reflect a little on why the fable inspires us. The fable’s clear purpose is to reveal a single aspect of the universality of human nature, particularly a human flaw. The fable is at its most effective when it delivers this thematic revelation through irony. Imagine if we could pluck these small, neatly-packaged pearls of wisdom about human behaviour out of the bigger historical drama. In other words, what if we could find a clear and simple theme at work exposing a human flaw or related set of flaws and, in particular, highlighted by the inclusion of irony? Just as with the fable used as source material, wouldn’t this little gem plucked out of the historical narrative also offer us some inspiration and guidance in developing a short story idea?
We have worked with the thin flesh of the fable to inspire and guide our ideas. Now we can apply that training to help us in this new task. We can reflect on how the human flaw works in the fable while we are researching and writing the essay. Of course, the essay will be too sophisticated to throw up only a single universal human flaw for a theme, and other themes, too, naturally, will be buried in the narrative, including historical ones such as regicide (king killing). Nevertheless, our mining technique means that we must spot a universal human flaw or narrowly related set of universal human flaws that are not just plot related, but that are plot driven. It is important to note that these character flaws must be based on a single character’s attitude which is undoubtedly the means of driving the historical plot; and other actors in the story are simply reacting to this driving force, at least for this part of the historical story. Th
is will help us greatly to write a tight essay. Even more importantly, we will end up with a sort of fable, albeit a much more sophisticated one, and one, of course, whose message is based on a real historical lesson. The Aesopic fable offers us the advantage of working with a pre-packaged, tight theme, but our new essay, where we see a fable at the heart of it, also offers us the advantage of rich character, plot, storyline and setting. So, if we write the essay with this embedded fable at the centre of it, this allows us to lift the fable’s rich character, theme and plot out of its historical context and drop it into another entirely different setting, just as we have done with our Aesopic fable.
Let’s sum up what our mining technique will concentrate on digging out from the historical narrative! A theme based on a single or closely related set of universal human flaws of a single character that arise from the character’s attitude and which drive the historical plot. Often, for convenience, you can sum the flaws up in a single flaw; with King Charles 1 (our main character in the essay) it is his overriding arrogance. Because the character’s flaws drive the plot, we will have action out of them. Action creates conflict. Irony rises out of conflict, clearly and starkly exposing the human flaws.