When it comes to writing, I am an Oliver Cowdery. I’ve got a few smarts and an education. I can write my way out of a paper bag. But when compared with Joseph Smith, I’m nothing special. You remember that after acting as Joseph’s scribe for a while, Oliver wanted his own chance at translating the Book of Mormon. If he was at all like me, he likely envied Joseph’s ability to enter into the ecstatic muse of translation, and wanted his own taste. So he managed to get permission from the Lord to do some translation, but when he tried his hand at it, he failed. Why? According to Doctrine and Covenants 9, Oliver hadn’t prepared well enough. “You have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me,” reads the revelation.

This verse encapsulates my many early years of attempted writing. I would get an idea that I thought had some potential and sit down to write. I had great faith that the muse would descend upon me and push words out of my fingertips. But it never worked. Never. I would frequently find my idea dried up and dead by the end of a single page. A narrative brick wall blocking my way.

It soon became painfully clear that I was in no way a natural born storyteller. But I’m a persistent little cuss, and I decided to learn how stories work the same way a mechanic learns how an engine works, or a doctor the human body. So what follows are the observations of one who had to learn story structure from the ground up. I’m like an autistic person who learns to read the emotions of others only through mapping the human face. I find the wheels and gears, the organs and veins of stories and watch them work.

I’ve never been very good at talking about what I’ve learned. People often accuse me of pushing formulaic storytelling. But what I try to present is a set of principles. These principles, far from fettering me, have unleashed my creative abilities. They’re like launching pads, booster rockets, and navigation systems, helping me chart a course. I know that many people believe that outlining a story will neuter the creative process. That the Muse will not descend on too tidy a brain. And this may well be the case for some writers. Like Joseph Smith, some people might just have the right wiring for ecstatic storytelling. But as far as I’ve been able to tell, these people are few and far between. I think the rest of us can enhance our storytelling abilities with a bit of planning.

For me, planning is the enjoyable creative work that precedes any complex endeavor. It resides in the architect who labors to draft the plans for a magnificent building.  I enjoy crafting the mainspring of a story and arranging the gears around it to achieve maximum effect. I enjoy sculpting and articulating the bones so that when they are covered with flesh, the body can move uninhibited. And then, when writing time comes, I find myself in possession of extra creative energy that I can pour into the drawing of characters, precise word choice, and apt metaphors because part of my brain isn’t worried about what will happen next in the story. I never hit dead ends. And often, in the thick of writing, I stumble across exciting ways to improve on the story. My own little bits of ecstasy.

So, with that introduction, I’ll talk about a few elements that I use as I prepare a story or a personal essay. The fist few principles will likely strike you as elementary, but I hope my formulation of their interaction will be helpful.

The most basic thing people look for in a story, even if they are not aware of it, is character change. Take a look at great literature and, with the exception of comedies, you will find that the main character goes through a mighty change, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Think of Henry V, or Bilbo Baggins, or Frank Miller. In this way, my approach to crafting a story is very character driven. The ways of coming up with a character are numerous. You likely have a way that works for you. When I’ve deveopled a character, and maybe even a situation, I appreciate having methods of plumbing the character’s depths, of finding his or her weaknesses and strengths, and of testing his or her character.

The first principle that has allowed me to do this is called a goal.

The Goal

The goal is the basic propellant of a story. It’s like the gas you put in a car. If the character has a small goal, any potential change will also be small. A large goal will increase the potential for change and therefore the power of the story. Now when I say small goal or large goal, I’m not necessarily talking in Hollywood terms. Taking down an earth-destroying super villain verses trying to get a bicycle back doesn’t have to equal big and small. A large goal is one that demands much from a character’s emotional and relational resources.

Principle 2: Opposition.

Along with the goal comes the need for antagonism: someone, or something, that opposes your character’s reaching of the goal. Again, you don’t need to think of opposition in Hollywood terms. A good antagonist can be the indifference of a large city or the prejudices of a small town. It can be the protagonist’s own fears, or a family tradition, or a piece of music. What you need is something or someone to resist your character’s attempts at the goal. Why do you need this resistance? Because otherwise your character will not struggle and will not change.

As the story goes along, the opposition should get stronger. There’s not much need for this principle in short stories where often there is room for only a single struggle, but in longer works, I have found it to be essential. Once you’ve tested a character to an intensity of 3, the character has demonstrated that he or she can also overcome opposition of intensity 2. But an intensity of 5 has yet to be attempted. The higher intensity the opposition is, the more powerful the story.

The story of a character with a goal who encounters opposition over a period of time looks kind of like the schema below; a series of goal attempts by the protagonist that result in larger and larger conflicts with the antagonist:

But this is the realm of the Saturday morning cartoon or the superhero movie. The goal merely tests the protagonist’s strength, or cleverness, or ammunition. The only thing the character needs to succeed is more of something than the opposition. But we’re here to talk about literary writing. In my definition, literary writing goes beyond the goal, heading into the dramatic need.

The Dramatic Need

The dramatic need is something in the protagonist that needs to change. The change is often a spiritual or moral one that strikes at the core of the protagonist’s life. As with the goal, the more sacrifice it takes for the character to achieve the dramatic need, the more powerful the story is.

It is often difficult to build a full-bodied dramatic need into a short story simply because there is so little time to make the change seem real. Think of half-hour sitcoms where a character says, “Oh, I see now that I was being insensitive. I will change.” We are rarely moved by such declarations simply because we don’t believe the change really occurred. This is why so many short stories that work have as their climax a character first glimpsing the terrifying notion of change, or suffering under the weight of consequence brought on by their brokenness.

If you build this into the schema, you’ll see that the dramatic need is often in direct conflict with the goal.

This is because goals are illusory. They rarely address the soul, though they often act as a metaphor for the dramatic need. Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all these things shall be added unto you.” The Buddha said that is it our desires that bind us.

I’m in the middle of watching the HBO television series, The Sopranos, many of the episodes are excellent examples of literary writing: the characters have compelling goals that are deftly balanced by their dramatic needs. Tony Soprano, for example, learns at the beginning of the first season that his deepest fear is that his position as a mob boss will strip him of his family. In one episode, he and his daughter are touring New England colleges. On the way, she confronts him with her evidence that he has ties to the mob, and he is semi-truthful with her. In return, she is truthful with him about her recent use of speed. “We have that kind of relationship, right?” she asks. “Where we can be honest with each other?” Tony wants that relationship really bad. His family means a lot to him.

The problem is, Tony spots a man who used to be a member of his father’s gang. The man had assisted the law in setting up a sting that had killed some of Tony’s friends and sent his father to jail. He is rightly angry with the man. He also takes his oath to his mob very seriously and knows it is his duty to off the man for his crime against the organization. He also wants to avenge his dead. His goal for the episode is to make sure this man is who he thinks he is, and take him down. But his daughter keeps catching him in incriminating situations: using a pay phone when his hotel room phone works fine, leaving the room in the early morning, coming home with mud on his shoes and lacerations on his hands. Their new-found honesty becomes untenable. How is he supposed to tell her that he’s tracking down a man so he can kill him? How can he not track this man down and kill him?

Tony reaches his goal in the end. He positively identifies the traitor and kills him. But his relationship with his daughter crumbles. He can’t be honest with her and she can tell. He’s losing his family, just as he had feared.

This ending is compelling because the goal and the dramatic need are deeply at odds. This is often the case with good literature. The more tension exists between the goal and the dramatic need, the more powerful the story is.

The basic structure of a drama is that a character meets his or her dramatic need. The basic structure of a tragedy is that the character doesn’t meet his or her dramatic need, often because he or she reaches his or her goal.  The basic structure of a comedy is that the character changes only minimally, if at all.

I found it interesting to apply these principles to the recent, highly successful move Avatar. I enjoyed the movie—actually watched it twice, which I rarely do—but I was disappointed by the story. The basic idea is that a crippled Marine named Jake becomes part of a program that places him inhabit an alien body. His mission is to find a way to convince a tribe of aliens to relocate so humans can mine a vein of valuable ore located beneath their village. The story goes along fine for the first act: Jake tries to become a part of the tribe, meeting opposition along the way. Then he meets larger opposition in the humans who are willing to bring their superior technology and firepower to bear on the village. There are goals a plenty, and there is also a stab made at a dramatic need. Jake does, after all, forsake his own people for the aliens. That seems like quite a change, and the movie tries to give it weight at the end when Jake’s human nemesis says, “How does it feel to betray your own kind?” However, how much did Jake have to sacrifice in order to join the alien culture? The movie makes it very clear that there is nothing Jake wants in the human world. He has no legs there; he has no community or family. The humans that surround him are ruthless, unfeeling moneygrubbers. On the other hand, there’s this great family-oriented race of blue-skinned supermodels who fly around on cool winged reptiles. Where’s the sacrifice? Had the story provided Jake with some compelling reasons for staying with the humans, the story would have been more powerful because then Jake would have had to sacrifice. And sacrifice is the foundation of a powerful story.

It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times in the last two months. I’ve had a lot of time to ask myself questions because I am the primary caretaker of the world’s most beautiful baby girl. How does the person inside the Bear in the Big Blue House costume see? Is it time for mom to come home, yet? Have I really needed to pee for four hours now? When was my last shower?

Taking care of my baby has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, but there is no doubt that my work has suffered. I used to sit down at my desk at 8 a.m. when my family went out the door and work straight until they returned at 4. It was a lovely, meditative life. I had time to do extra projects on the side. I was PRODUCTIVE.

Then came the world’s most beautiful baby. Now I spend my waking hours building block towers for smashing, watching puppets sing about oral hygiene, picking raisins and cheerios off the floor, and playing with my baby. Now I start work at about 6:30 p.m. And go till 2 a.m. My brain doesn’t function as well then, and I can’t crank up my tunes. I have zero time for side projects.

At first I tried to work while baby was around, but the laptop buttons are an irresistible siren to her. It was too much of an effort to get the laptop open and start something that needs as much focused attention as editing knowing that I would be interupted. I found myself getting irritable, being caught between baby and work.

I’m the oldest of nine children: I know that babies grow up fast. So I decided to dump work and just play with baby. It was a good idea. I’ve been able to savor her babyhood, which I will never get another chance to do.

But I had no time for doing my own writing and it really started wearing on me. Would I not have a creative outlet for another four years when baby went off to school? Would I still be sane by then?

I hear generations of women heaving an exasperated sigh :women who spent 30 years in my same position without any respite on the horizon. What would they do to me if they found out that my life has been given back to me through the miracle of a cell phone?

I was going to get the free cell phone because I pride myself in staying aloof from our consumerist, toy-obsessed culture. But then I saw that some phones come with a qwerty keyboard, and the gears started to turn. I got the tough phone, the phone with a keyboard my fat thumbs could navigate, the one with the GPS I still haven’t learned how to use.

I have since become an avid Facebook user, a dedicated New York Times reader, and — yes indeed — a writer of short stories.

At first, I thought the cell phone would only be good for outlining and planning, and it worked very well in that capacity. But the boredom of watching that Bear in the Big Blue House episode one more time drove me to try my thumb at composing. And by gum, it works!

I’ve started to realize that the thumb board, which allows me to type at about a tenth of the speed I can type on a full-size keyboard, is actually well suited to my composing speed. When it comes to fiction, words don’t surface very for me quickly, and I hate it when my inner editor makes me focus more on what I should have written rather than what I am actually writing. The thumb board seems to give me permission to just keep plodding along. And the words scroll up out of the screen quickly. Out of sight, out of mind.

A week or so ago, I finished my first cell phone tome. I figure I wrote about 500 words a day, which is 500 more words a day than I used to write.  Admittedly, I still have to revise on my computer, but I’m not complaining. I’ve got my writing life back.

This post brought to you by my Nokia E71.

I admit that it took a bit of time for me to get into it. The first segment was a telling of the oft-repeated story of the shootings in an Amish school and the community’s seemingly instantaneous forgiveness of the perpetrator. Then the movie headed into the story of a woman who managed to live a happy life despite an abusive childhood and being infected with HIV. I can’t remember much about that segment.

But the next two segments really intrigued me. The first dealt with Terri Jentz, the author of Strange Piece of Paradise, who survived a brutal, anonymous attack. After the attack, she lived through 15 years of torpor and depression. During that time, when someone would ask her about her feelings about her attacker, she would say, “Oh, I’m above that. I’ve forgiven him.” It wasn’t until she started to dig into her case, trying to track her attacker down, that she came alive again. She says near the end of the segment that her 15 years of “forgiveness” were unhealthy for her.

The last segment was about Katherine Ann Power who, during an armed bank robbery to get money to support her Vietnam War protest, was complicit in the killing of a police officer. She managed to evade the law for 23 years, and probably would have done so indefinitely, except that, being overwhelmed by her conscience, she finally turned herself in.

As Whitney told us before the screening, the meaning of forgiveness is under intense debate right now. But I saw an interesting definition arising from these stories. It’s best illustrated with a scene from the movie Stranger than Fiction, where Will Ferrell’s character realizes that he is a character in an in-progress novel. In the middle of the movie, Ferrell decides that if he remains immobile, he can derail the plot and get his life back. So he sits in a chair for hours until his apartment wall is suddenly knocked in by a crane. The plot has come to get him. After that, he becomes a very active main character, tracking down the author and taking control of his story.

As Frances Menlove wrote in the most recent issue of Sunstone, “We all know that the universe isn’t made of atoms; it is made of stories.” Each woman spent a lot of time hiding from her life story. The woman infected with HIV turned to addictive behavior to avoid dealing with her life’s plot points. Jentz pretended that a major character in her life’s story didn’t matter. Power, like Ferrell, hid from the sad stories she had set in motion. They were passive main characters, letting other forces run their lives. And, of course, if you relinquish the story of your life, your soul is bound to start fading. Life seemed to regain richness and meaning when the women actively re-entered their stories.

So perhaps forgiveness is when you become an active protagonist in your life story. It’s when you say, “Here are the pieces of my story. I’m not going to ignore them. I’m going to make something new out of them.”

Prizes: A total of $450 will be shared among the winning entries.

Rules:

1. Up to three entries may be submitted by a single author. Five copies of each entry must be delivered (or postmarked) to Sunstone by 15 February 2010. Entries will not be returned. A $5 fee must accompany each entry.

2. Each essay must be typed, double-spaced, on one side of white paper and be stapled in the upper left corner. All essays must be 3500 words or fewer. The author’s name should not appear on any page of the essay.

3. Each entry must be accompanied by a cover letter that states the essay’s title and the author’s name, mailing address, email address, and telephone number. Each cover letter must be signed and attest that the entry is the author’s work, that it has not been previously published, that it is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere, will not be submitted to other forums until after the contest, and that, if the entry wins, Sunstone magazine has one-time, first-publication rights.

Sunstone

England Essay Contest

343 North Third West

Salt Lake City, Utah 84103–1215

Early in my MFA, a teacher warned us, “Dreams are exposition in a ball gown.” And if you think about it, it’s pretty true most of the time. How often have we watched a character wake screaming from a nightmare that had revealed bits of his backstory? How many musical dreams have we suffered through in order to understand the roots of a farm animal’s anxieties?

I must admit that expository dreams are a step up from listening to a character talk about her backstory. At least we get to watch chase scenes and flying elephants instead of listening to a voiceover while the main character drifts glumly along barren streets.

But still, it seems like dreams have more dramatic potential than that. The first thing that comes to mind when I try to think of a dream with actual dramatic weight is The Wizard of Oz where almost the entire story takes place in a dream. Or Alice in Wonderland where the heroine creeps into a dream world through a rabbit hole. But in both these cases, the dream world functions as the real world, while the “real” world acts like an expository dream. In it, we meet characters that will show up later in altered form, or we learn of problems that the protagonist will find the fortitude to overcome while in the fantasy world.

So again, the dream–the reality alternate to the main reality of the story–functions as exposition.

As I consider what I’ve written, I suddenly realize that I’m defining dreams as alternate, ephemeral realities that have no impact on the “real” world. I also realize that this definition of a dream is historically pretty recent. Looking back on older literature, such as the Bible, I remember that people considered dreams as valid playesr in the real world. Pharoah took them seriously enough to hire dream interpreters. Joseph followed a dream and whisked his young family to Egypt. The premise of Revelation is that a dream can show a hidden reality that affects seen reality.

So there seem to be two basic approaches to dreams. The first treats them as valid realities. The second considers them mental phenomena that have only symbolic meaning. It seems to me that the second approach is considered the more realistic one these days. Thus, when a story treats a dream as a reality equal in validity to the “real” world, we call it fantasy or magical realism, while a story that treats a dream as unequal to the “real” world is called realism.

When a dream is a valid reality in a story, it obviously has all sorts of dramatic potential. We have thousands of years of literature to prove that. But the current conception of a dream, and the demands of realist literature, seems to strip a lot of that potential away, leaving us with the imaginative but dramatically limp dream scenes we read and see today. I even admit, with great sadness, that one of my favorite movie scenes–the dream sequence from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries–though a masterpiece, is exposition.

In order to regain their fertility in realist writing, I think dreams need to become more like characters than settings. They need to be an antagonist or ally to the protagonist, working for or against the character’s goals and dramatic needs.

One metaphor for what I’m getting at is the movie Stranger than Fiction where a man discovers that he is a character in a novel-in-progress and tries to derail the plot. At one point, he decides that his best course of action is inaction and he holes himself up in his apartment, watching television, refusing to move even to change the channel. But suddenly a crane tears down the outside wall of his apartment and it becomes apparent that the plot, refusing to be stopped, has come to get him.

Judith Guest’s novel, Ordinary People, has a good example of a dramatically weighty dream. Conrad, a teen who survived a boating accident his brother didn’t, is the victim of nightmares that push him toward suicide. He spends the book wrestling with these dreams with the help of a psychiatrist, trying to beat them before they beat him.

I’m on the lookout for dramatically weighty dreams in realist  literature or film. Any suggestions?

Tuesday, November 17
Level 4 Meeting Room, Salt Lake City Main Library
210 East 400 South, Salt Lake.

Mingling at 6:30 pm, lecture starts at 7:00 pm.

You can also connect with this event on Facebook.

The first part of the article takes us inside a story meeting where a murder mystery morphs into a dozen different forms over the course of ten minutes. At first, I was a bit taken aback by this process, the story was like a rag doll of indeterminate species, its limbs being torn off and others being basted on, only to be replaced by something completely different and then turned inside out. But, you know, the story they were coming with was kinda interesting.

This approach to story making is antithetical to the solitary writer mythos. I’ve noticed that often people–consciously ot not–write a story to express a part of themselves. So when someone suggests changes to the story, the author feels personally attacked. The problem with hammering out a story in solitude and connecting it so deeply with oneself is that sometimes what seems obvious to the author is mystifying to the reader. The other problem is that storytelling, in the end, is an act of communication. It is the author knowing how to use the raw material of reader’s imagination to build something.

This rag doll approach to story might be a good way for writers to play constructively with storytelling. To explore the possibilities of a narrative and how it plays with an audience without having to put their own story on the line. Perhaps the insights writers have while playing this game will begin to seep into their work.

This Sunday, Bill Bradshaw, a professor of biology at BYU, will speak on the relationship between science and religion. It’s sure to be interesting and fun. Please stay afterward. Those cookies won’t eat themselves, you know.

Place:
Sunstone House
343 North 300 West
Salt Lake City
(parking in back and on the street)

Time:
6 p.m.

What more could you ask for?

The movie is called Corianton: A Story of Unholy Love. Based on the story of Alma’s wayward missionary son, it premiered in 1931, being produced by Lester Park, Orson Scott Card’s grandfather. However, after a disappointing six-week run, the film vanished until three years ago when the Card family donated a long-hidden copy to BYU.

I don’t think anyone is going to argue that Corianton is great cinema, though its camp quotient may be enough to win it a solid place as a favorite group date movie at BYU. However, it has one huge thing going for it: it pulls out all the stops, throws them away, and pounds the keys for all it’s worth.

One of the main things that I think holds Mormon artists, writers, filmmakers, etc. back from reaching a wider audience and addressing Mormon life more authentically is the deeply ingrained idea that we should set good examples and never make the Church look “bad.” This “every member a PR rep” attitude makes us second-guess ourselves constantly. “Will this drive someone away from the Church?” we wonder? “Will it give outsiders the wrong impression of us?” So we make paint-by-numbers, literal-minded work brimming with “values,” making sure every step is safe.

Not so with Corianton. Sure, there was some preaching, a repentant hero soliloquizing to the heavens, and a couple of hymn-type songs, but it was also packed wall to wall with big-bearded men in skirts bellowing at each other like elephant seals, ghostly-skinned women striking romantic poses, dancers looking as if they had mugged a flock of peacocks, and a leopard-skin-clad heretic struck down by lightening.

A playbill for the movie (on display in the Lee Library) shows a less-than-clothed showgirl stretched sensuously across a couch, and hovering just above her, large as life, the words “MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR.”

For me, this unabashed, even brazen, fusion of pop culture with the Book of Mormon was refreshing. It made me think for a moment that maybe my church could be entertaining despite the righteousness coming out its ears.

I’ve decided to make Corianton my mascot for Mormon art. It’s not the paragon of anything, but mascots never are. They’re dopey, oversized plush toys that mostly make us laugh (but hey, they get to hang out with the cheerleaders, right?). The most important thing about them is that they make us want to cheer. They make us want our team to do better. They show us, in their broad, hammy gestures what it is we’re reaching for.

What does an angel do to a story? Functionally, it seems to me that angels represent the absolute value that drives the story. They embody that which lies at the heart of the story’s value system. The question, then, is where is that value best placed for maximum dramatic value?

Depends on how you look at the function of a protagonist. Is a protagonist supposed to change through his or her own volition, or should that change be foisted upon the character from without? I personally think it is much more interesting to see what arises from the choices of a volitional protagonist, because then we see a character creating him or herself, rather than as a ball of clay changed only from without. Maybe it’s the Mormon in me, chanting, “Do what is right, let the consequence follow.”

Angels who show up at the end of a story, then, annoy me. They arrive to set everything in order, or reap vengeance, or deliver the moral. They overshadow the volition of the protagonist. They make the protagonist’s volition seem small and inconsequential, which leads me to ask, “Why have we been following a dramatically insignificant protagonist all this time?”

The angels at the beginning of a story intrigue me. They set a goal before the protagonist; often a veiled goal whose true identity and importance are revealed later through the actions of the protagonist. Angels at the beginning hold out promises. Of course, they aren’t always inviting people into adventure; sometimes they’re forcing them into it: think of the angel that kept Adam and Even away from the tree of life, setting the entire human race into a gigantic story.

I tested my ideas out on some scripture stories, and found that, for the most part, they seem to uphold me.

The three angels sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah set Abraham out on perilous quest. (Not to mention the angel who saves Abraham from the sacrificial altar in the Pearl of Great Price – not as the climax of the story, but as the event that sends Abraham into a lifetime of troubles and adventure.)

The angels who put the coal on Isaiah’s lips. (Off you go, little prophet!)

The angel Jacob wrestles with.

The angel who announces Mary’s pregnancy.

The angel who warns Joseph to move his family to Egypt.

The angel who fortifies Nephi’s resolve through a vision of the tree of life. (Thinking on this further, another angel shows up in Nephi’s story to rip into his brothers, but this angel isn’t nearly as interesting dramatically, since all the angel does is level the playing field and give us a little revenge thrill

The angel who sends Alma the Younger into a new life.

And finally, a set of angels that has sent a world of Christians on a two-thousand year quest to see the second coming of Jesus.

Yeah. I say, if you’re going to use an angel, put it at the beginning. Use the angel as the fuse instead of as the explosion. An angel explosion just isn’t very interesting.