For the previous parts in the story rules series:
Story Rules Part 1: Kill Your Ego
Story Rules Part 2: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
Story Rules Part 3: Story Is Character & Character Is Story
Story Rules Part 4: Lacuna - Create Space the Audience
People often confuse lack of clarity and being hard to understand with being deep and intellectual. Nothing is further from the truth. If you have a message that you want to communicate, you need to make yourself understood. To make yourself understood you first need to make your audience want to listen. To make your audience want to listen you need to make it clear for them what they have to gain by listening to you.
Remember that your audience never owes you anything. They have already invested either time or money or both to listen to you. If you don't repay their investment it is your own fault if they get bored and don't want to listen.
Being clear does not mean to give everything away, nor does it mean to treat your audience like idiots. Respect your audience by letting them know what you're about to tell them and why they should listen. While argumenting for your message, challenge them by asking questions and leaving in small holes, lacunae, on the way som that they are allowed to fill in the blanks. Finally sum it all up and prove your message in a clear well made package that repays the audiences investment.
The best way to make something clear is through contrast. By showing difference and change.
At the end of a story the character has traveled a path since the beginning. You need to show what she has learned and if she follows her lesson to do something about her need, or continues down the wrong path. By mirroring the ending with the beginning you create contrast, a reference for change. Mirroring does not mean making the ending a full copy of the beginning, but putting the character under a similar choice at the end as he did in the beginning as to reveal how his new context has developed from his old context.
By argumenting for your message from different angles, by showing both sides of the coin, you will make yourself more convincing. You show that you this is a subject that you care about enough to have put effort in. You show your passion and passion is contagious.
At the middle part of the story, from conflict through complication and to the climax, you argument for your message. First you criticise what is wrong, you show the character reacting to a conflict but doing so in a naive way, without changing the root of the problem, and by doing so he crates a complication, he shows that this is the wrong way. During the complication the character is forced to see how the situation was created, his flaws, and in doing so you show the right way to the goal, you show the solution in the characters need.
Going back and forth between positive and negative choices creates a contrast that makes the right choice more clear so that the audience understands the characters choice at the climax, and what the character have to gain by following the solution or what they have to lose by not following it.
If the character choses to follow what he has learned he will gain some kind of a price (either physical, emotional or psychological) and in doing so he shows the audience that following the "right path" is more fruitful. If the character choses not to follow what he's learned he will lose something dear to him, and in doing so he shows the audience how much they can come to lose by not following the "right path". The result is made clearer in the previously mentioned new context.
What is important remember, that many forget or don't think about, is that when telling a tragedy you need to show the positives. You need to show what the character loses in the end. When telling a story with a positive ending you need to show the struggles and suffering the character had to go through to get to that point for the ending to being valuable and emotional.
It might be worth to point out that the hardest struggles and the biggest losses are the psychological (we can punish ourselves far more than anybody else can punish us) and that the physical losses, in good stories, tend to be a metaphor for something psychological.
During the story you also reveal who a character is by how he differs from other characters in a story. Gray is dark besides white and light besides black. To show good you need to show bad and the opposite. So, don't have two characters that have the same function, unless if you want to use mirror characters. Using mirror characters is to have two similar characters where one follows the "right path" and the other doesn't. Through this contrast you reveal the message.
Clarity needs contrast. Light is only light besides something dark, loud is only loud besides something silent and happy is only happy besides something sad. Use contrast to your advantage and both make yourself easier to understand and more convincing.
This has been the last part of my story rules. I hope that you have found something helpful that you can apply to your way of working, but don't blindly copy anything that I've written. There is always something to learn from everybody no matter who they are, but blindly following someone else seldom leads to where you want to go. So, always listen, but only follow yourself. Hear what people say and take whats valuable and adapt through who you are to your way of working.
Thank you for reading, I hope you've found something helpful in this series!
Peter Hertzberg
Story Rules Part 1: Kill Your Ego
Story Rules Part 2: Don't Reinvent the Wheel
Story Rules Part 3: Story Is Character & Character Is Story
Story Rules Part 4: Lacuna - Create Space the Audience
People often confuse lack of clarity and being hard to understand with being deep and intellectual. Nothing is further from the truth. If you have a message that you want to communicate, you need to make yourself understood. To make yourself understood you first need to make your audience want to listen. To make your audience want to listen you need to make it clear for them what they have to gain by listening to you.
Remember that your audience never owes you anything. They have already invested either time or money or both to listen to you. If you don't repay their investment it is your own fault if they get bored and don't want to listen.
Being clear does not mean to give everything away, nor does it mean to treat your audience like idiots. Respect your audience by letting them know what you're about to tell them and why they should listen. While argumenting for your message, challenge them by asking questions and leaving in small holes, lacunae, on the way som that they are allowed to fill in the blanks. Finally sum it all up and prove your message in a clear well made package that repays the audiences investment.
The best way to make something clear is through contrast. By showing difference and change.
At the end of a story the character has traveled a path since the beginning. You need to show what she has learned and if she follows her lesson to do something about her need, or continues down the wrong path. By mirroring the ending with the beginning you create contrast, a reference for change. Mirroring does not mean making the ending a full copy of the beginning, but putting the character under a similar choice at the end as he did in the beginning as to reveal how his new context has developed from his old context.
By argumenting for your message from different angles, by showing both sides of the coin, you will make yourself more convincing. You show that you this is a subject that you care about enough to have put effort in. You show your passion and passion is contagious.
At the middle part of the story, from conflict through complication and to the climax, you argument for your message. First you criticise what is wrong, you show the character reacting to a conflict but doing so in a naive way, without changing the root of the problem, and by doing so he crates a complication, he shows that this is the wrong way. During the complication the character is forced to see how the situation was created, his flaws, and in doing so you show the right way to the goal, you show the solution in the characters need.
Going back and forth between positive and negative choices creates a contrast that makes the right choice more clear so that the audience understands the characters choice at the climax, and what the character have to gain by following the solution or what they have to lose by not following it.
If the character choses to follow what he has learned he will gain some kind of a price (either physical, emotional or psychological) and in doing so he shows the audience that following the "right path" is more fruitful. If the character choses not to follow what he's learned he will lose something dear to him, and in doing so he shows the audience how much they can come to lose by not following the "right path". The result is made clearer in the previously mentioned new context.
What is important remember, that many forget or don't think about, is that when telling a tragedy you need to show the positives. You need to show what the character loses in the end. When telling a story with a positive ending you need to show the struggles and suffering the character had to go through to get to that point for the ending to being valuable and emotional.
It might be worth to point out that the hardest struggles and the biggest losses are the psychological (we can punish ourselves far more than anybody else can punish us) and that the physical losses, in good stories, tend to be a metaphor for something psychological.
During the story you also reveal who a character is by how he differs from other characters in a story. Gray is dark besides white and light besides black. To show good you need to show bad and the opposite. So, don't have two characters that have the same function, unless if you want to use mirror characters. Using mirror characters is to have two similar characters where one follows the "right path" and the other doesn't. Through this contrast you reveal the message.
Clarity needs contrast. Light is only light besides something dark, loud is only loud besides something silent and happy is only happy besides something sad. Use contrast to your advantage and both make yourself easier to understand and more convincing.
This has been the last part of my story rules. I hope that you have found something helpful that you can apply to your way of working, but don't blindly copy anything that I've written. There is always something to learn from everybody no matter who they are, but blindly following someone else seldom leads to where you want to go. So, always listen, but only follow yourself. Hear what people say and take whats valuable and adapt through who you are to your way of working.
Thank you for reading, I hope you've found something helpful in this series!
Peter Hertzberg
Comments
Post a Comment