Narrative Theory Series
Character Interactions & Narrative Progression
Orange Bow Ties
The image above appears to have three random scenes or moments, and disconnected events and people, at least at the level of plot (what is directly shown). Or, maybe there is a storyline here, if you put tome thought and imagination into it, creating your own story. Probably 50 people will imagine 50 different stories out of these three images, which is something that one could research via an open ended survey questionnaire, if one wanted to. But despite the seeming randomness of the image — which is a triptych to be precise — its visual structure of presenting 3 panels does give it a strong narrative sense (e.g. Beginning, Middle and End). The painter here calls his work Narrative Theory to make us think about how we create stories as part of understanding anything in general.
As a thought experiment, let’s create a 3-sentence story, which will be a kind of textual triptych:
A boy is with his mother and he sees some ice cream. He indicates that he wants some ice cream, and the mother buys it for him. He enjoys the ice cream.
Here we have: space and time, characters, causality, and a medium (text), which are key components of the narrative matrix discussed in the first article in this series, but something important for narrative is lacking. The story is boring, but the missing ingredient is not ‘interestingness’ of course, but conflict.
Whence Conflict?
In the image above, we now have the beginnings of a conflict brewing. The universe of smooth spacetime and causal flows has now experienced a ripple of disturbance: a yellow person has showed up at a party of green people, wearing an orange bow tie instead of a green neck tie, and despite other clear similarities (same shaped head, one eye, a forehead contiguous with the nose & missing mouth), there is a clear sense of trouble brewing. Todorov called this Disruption or Disturbance of the Equilibrium (presumably the party was going fine until the wrong invitee showed up. Now there’s a disturbance that has to be resolved so that balance can be restored).
We can step back and ask a basic question: why is there conflict? Or to put the question another way: what are the sources of conflict? One well known rule of thumb has it this way:
The diagram to the left, though, leaves out the obvious fifth source: Man vs. Feminism! Sadly, English is lacking in gender neutral pronouns, but we get a taste of this fifth source of conflict in the lower right image, where there is an angry Hilary Clinton type chasing a Man away with her pointy finger. Oh wait, that’s not Hilary Clinton, who was famous for wearing pant suits not skirts. But you get the point.
Some have argued, via stick figure scribbles rather than literary theory, that there are actually 26 different kinds of narrative conflict:
My favorites above are: Man vs. Unwanted Cactus, Man vs. Overpriced Wifi Connection, Man vs. Mexican Self & Man vs. Lack of Conflict.
Here’s a model of sources of conflict as epochs in literature over thousands of years:
Abstracting from our everyday experiences, other sources of conflict might be:
- any difference, great or mild: e.g. bow ties vs. neck ties, or yellow vs. green complexion
- scarcity: there’s only so much to go around, whether it’s limited space on highway lanes causing road rage at the merge, or two rivals competing over the same love interest
- different definitions of reality: e.g. there really is no way for secular Western leaders to sit down and through nice friendly dialogue negotiate with the so-called Islamic State or ISIS. The respective versions of reality are just too different to even have a conversation most of the time.
- You can’t always get what you want (Rolling Stones song)
Desire
The playwright and filmmaker David Mamet once wrote that all drama only has to answer three questions:
- Who wants what from whom?
- What happens when they don’t get it?
- Why now?
What’s especially nice about these three questions is that it points directly to our opening story (baby, mommy, ice cream) -> usually, life doesn’t give you what you want when you want it (despite the best efforts of user experience designers!). If life gives you what you want, there is literally no story to tell. Things only get interesting when desire is frustrated. Come to think of it, good narrative understood this way is the exact opposite of good interface design! Hmmmmm.
Some theorists argue that it is really desire which is the main driver of narrative, since stories can often be described as being about people who want stuff. Robbers want money, families want justice, cops want donuts, aliens want Earth, boy wants boy, girl wants boy who wants boy, talking toys want to be played with, soldiers want to kill the enemy, politician wants to be elected, drug kingpin wants more power and money, actor wants fame, dying person wants to live, killer wants to kill, monster wants to be left alone from encroaching humans, etc.
Desire plays out not just within the motivations of characters to drive their actions, but also plays out in us, the audience. Audiences want to be entertained, they want closure and happy endings, they want the price of their ticket to be worth it, they want 3D effects and they want happy endings.
In psychoanalysis, a key point about desire is that it can never be fulfilled. As soon as a desire is satiated, a new desire emerges. We desire to desire, and there is no end to desire. In narrative, we can become addicted to wanting to know what comes next, and following the plot can become a compulsion. Narratives can also feed our desire to find out about ‘forbidden’ desires, i.e. to transgress social taboos about what is allowed to be desired.
Conflicts from Traits
The French philosopher-playwright Sartre had a famous line in his play No Exit, which imagines Hell as being stuck in a room forever with two other people: “Hell is other people!” Because this line is well-known, here’s a bigger chunk of the play showing the surrounding context of the famous quote:
GARCIN: Will night never come?
INEZ: Never.
GARCIN: You will always see me?
INEZ: Always.
GARCIN: This bronze. Yes, now’s the moment; I’m looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I’m in hell. I tell you, everything’s been thoughtout beforehand. They knew I’d stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS-OTHER PEOPLE!
ESTELLE: My darling! Please-
GARCIN: No, let me be. She is between us. I cannot love you when she’s watching.
ESTELLE: Right! In that case, I’ll stop her watching. (She picks up the PAPER knife and stabs Inez several times.)
INEZ: But, you crazy creature, what do you think you’re doing? You know quite well I’m dead.
ESTELLE: Dead?
INEZ: Dead! Dead! Dead! Knives, poison, ropes — useless. It has happened already, do you understand? Once and for all. SO here we are, forever.
ESTELLE: Forever. My God, how funny! Forever.
GARCIN: For ever, and ever, and ever. (A long silence.)
GARCIN: Well, well, let’s get on with it…
While many of us will never get to test this hypothesis (that there is a Hell and it involves being stuck with other people forever in a room), there are other more everyday situations that are not too dissimilar, such as being stuck in an elevator suddenly for a long time with strangers, which is also the premise of an Archer episode, which in tv parlance is called a ‘bottle episode’ because the whole story is set in one location.
Try this for a narrative exercise, to warm up your Character and Conflict juices: imagine some characters stuck in an elevator, and over time conflict emerges out of their differences and their confinement. To use more conceptual language, in this example Difference and Confinement are two parameters of the ensuing conflict.
Re-Sequencing the Narrative Arc
While a narrative is said to have a Beginning, a Middle and an End (because Aristotle said it, and ancient Greek philosophers tend to get repeated a lot over the years), these sections do not necessarily have to unfold in this way. Watch Mogwai’s music video below, Hunted by a Freak. As you do so, try to answer these questions:
- Where does the narrative begin?
- Where does it end?
- What path is traced throughout?
- Why is the animation structured this way?
There’s a lot going in in this video that we can explore with some narrative theory. However, let’s make a slight detour into music theory. Below is a waveform of a work of music — it’s Chopin, not Mogwai, but illustrates a similar idea.
A waveform representation is similar to the idea & structure of a narrative arc, because time is plotted on the Y axis, while intensity (loudness or acoustic energy) is plotted on the X axis (with narrative arcs, vertical intensity is not loudness but emotional energy). This gives us a clue for narrative re-sequencing of events, because the peaks and valleys (or loud and quiet parts) of the song are intermittent, rather than building up toward the end. So, the music’s logic of intensity shapes the narrative flow of information, so that the more dramatic moments are concentrated around the musical peaks, while the less intense events occur around the quieter sections.
This relationship of time and intensity helps with understanding the structure of the narrative as presented in the music video. We have two stark contrasts in personality in the video, the character we can call ‘Freak’(from the title of the music) and the cute little colorful animals who are mistreated. While you may not think it at first, Mogwai’s music video is very Aristotelian, because Aristotle wrote about two emotional poles that characters in dramas can have:
Pity: our being drawn emotionally towards a character (empathy, sympathy)
Fear: our being repulsed by a character (reprehension, emotional distance)
These words “pity” and “fear” are translations of the original Greek words, but the idea they capture is that we can either be drawn sympathetically towards characters in a narrative, or we can be made to become more emotionally distant from them. The Mogwai video applies Aristotle’s concepts very directly, giving us a clearly negative character whom we do not like, and for whom we probably have little sympathy, while giving us opposing characters that are colorful, cute, and vehicles of pure pity for our emotional attachment.
The Narrative Arc
The idea of a narrative arc suggests a curved continuum, but out of that smooth flow of events clear differentiated sections are typically conceptualized. The film scholar David Bordwell gave it fours sections:
To summarize Bordwell’s model:
- Setup: the world as normal, like Spielberg movies at the beginning. Kids riding their bikes in suburban subdivisions with sunny day and dogs barking.
- Complication: aliens land and mess things up. The world is now out of balance.
- Development: the kids on bikes figure out how to send the aliens away or in general defeat and/or slay them in a PG all ages family friendly way
- Resolution: aliens go away, so the kids can keep biking on pleasant suburban streets, but some aliens survive to plot another day, setting up the sequel.
Review the comic strips below and see if you agree with the mapping of Bordwell’s 4 sections of the narrative arc. To help get the comparison going, I have started with 4 panel comics to see, experimentally, if each panel can be said to correspond to an arc section. But then I introduce 3 and 5 panel comics to see if it makes a difference.
Let’s test Bordwell’s theory of a 4-part narrative arc with the help of PBF Comics.
Setup: There’s an astronaut on the Moon. Complication: Whoah, wait, that’s weird, fellow astronaut doesn’t need a helmet! Development: Well, if he doesn’t need a helmet, neither do I! Oops, my head exploded. Resolution: High five, his buddies enjoy their prank.
Setup: Awwww, love in the snow at Whistler. Complication: The guy, being more macho, is unsatisfied with the mere period at the end of his girlfriend’s sentence, so he says it louder with an exclamation mark at the end of his sentence. Development: He really wants to get loud and declarative and all caps, causing acoustic waves out to fracture the surrounding snow, uh oh. Resolution: They live happily ever after, and get a free goat pet out of the deal.
Setup: Some blob dude is falling who knows why. Complication: Oh, it was just his dream, and the blob dude wakes up. Development: Oh wait, maybe Resolution: it’s not a dream, it was another real blob dude. Maybe the dream was a premonition?
Setup: Typical kid afraid of falling asleep because of shadow monsters. Complication: The dad doesn’t seem to care that much. Development: There really is a monster under his bed. Resolution: The dad pays off the monster kid assassin.
Setup: Nerd scientist enters a lab, he’s obviously a bit obsequious because of his need for permission from a Sir. Complication: Nerd can’t find his Sir. Oh no! Sir has been shrunken by their nerdy shrink ray gun. Development: Nerd gets some very non-obsequious ideas. Is he gonna grab the gun and shrink Sir some more? Resolution: Nah, there’s a handy roach nearby, that’ll do!
Setup: Awwww, bunnies in a hole. Complication: Awwww, they’re not just in their bunny hole, they’ve become trapped. Development: A bad joke about lots of narrative climaxes. Resolution: They escape!
Setup: A forest with pink unicorns. Complication: The population of pink unicorns is dwindling. Development: A hero appears! Resolution: A bad joke about lots of narrative climaxes.
Setup: There’s a teacher somewhere gets asked a simple question. Complication: Oh no, it reminds him of his lost love, who maybe died in a horrible car accident when a meteor fell on their car. Development: The teacher collapses in sorrow. Resolution: There is no resolution, just endless suffering for the rest of his life.
As I think can be seen from this exercise, sometimes these four Bordwell sections map directly to four literal panels in four-panel comic strips, and when there are three or five panels, they still work pretty well, but you have to wiggle the categories a little to the left or right of the panel boundaries.
Other Models of the Narrative Arc
We have so far modeled the structure of narrative conflict along the lines of the narrative arc (low-to-peak and back-to-low emotional intensity) and divided into sections of Setup (world as normal), Complication (normality disturbed), Development (trying to eliminate the tension) and Resolution (world back to some normality). Other narrative theorists have developed alternative or even complementary models of the narrative arc that do not necessarily contradict this model, but provide other conceptual spins on the general idea.
The earliest model is Aristotle’s from the Poetics, which actually contained more elements than previously mentioned. He was fond of turning points and reversals of fortune, and Greek words of course:
Here we see a lot of Greek terms that you will not be tested on (plus a French term too!). This idea of tying and untying a knot is interesting — the idea is that the narrative (he is writing about Greek tragedy specifically) should have a specific turning point where things begin to unravel or there is a reversal of fortune. Here’s the original passage:
On top of this original structure of Aristotle’s, which is over 2500 years old now, other sections and terms have been added, such as a 3-Act or even 5-Act structure used to write plays, the Climax as a peak of emotional intensity towards the end (a kind of metabolic metaphor applied to narrative time), and the concept of Rising and Falling Action.
In most narratives that we are familiar with, the Denouement (resolution) is usually the shortest section, much shorter typically compared to the Setup (beginning of the narrative). Narratives tend not to focus too much on consequences and endings of conflict, and tend to wrap the story up pretty quickly after the climactic section. Some forms like the novel, being more intellectual, may spend more time dwelling on the Denouemont, whereas with blockbuster films, you just get a few minutes after the dust clears from the big fight scene to wrap things up, and find out whether heroes obtain their love interest and so on.
Ohler’s Story Map concept adds some additional dimensions to the narrative arc. The Middle of the narrative is understood to comprise the Problem and its Solution, which might have particular usefulness for games where problem solving is often a key mechanic. The Beginning can be comprised of a challenge, goal, obstacle or opportunity, while the End shows how each of these elements at the Beginning are resolved or overcome.
Sometimes game mechanics like problem solving make their way into films, a good example being the indie film Circle, in which characters suddenly wake up in a gamified murder trap and have to work together to solve challenges such as: who gets killed next? how do I survive? who should survive? who put us here?
Below are some Ohlerian approaches to mapping the same story. Also shown are examples of how to move from a traditional script format into something that can be used as part of a production workflow, for instance in planning the production of media for interactive narrative. The main technique is to convert paragraphs into tables (i.e. spreadsheets) since a spreadsheet is the archetype, so to speak, of the database (data in cells formed by the intersection of columns and rows).
What’s especially useful about tables and list-like formats is that they lend themselves towards ways of thinking about narrative in more database-like terms.
It’s easier to envision how a narrative can become interactive when it is broken down into table and list formats.
An idea implicit in the narrative arc is that events should progress along the lines of Rising and Falling Action.
In Hunted by a Freak (the Mogwai music video), this is literal, with Freak rising up the fire escape, and the falling is done by dropping bound cute pets towards the street below.
Freytag’s pyramid consists of the following structural concepts:
- The exposition provides the early material of the theme. The setting is established as well as the major characters. There may be a hint of the coming conflict.
- Increase in uncertainty and tension regarding the conflict being faced by the protagonists.
- The climax is usually set in the third act of the play, and is the moment of greatest tension, uncertainty and audience involvement. Sometimes this is also called the crisis.
- The reversal usually refers to the change of fortune. In classical Greek tragedy, the reversal is when the protagonist’s fortunes change for the worse, usually caused by a trait that is something that we admire in them. This positive trait is what brings about their downfall.
- Tragic recognition ensues, and the hero recognizes their tragic error.
- The failing fortunes of the hero are traced out, called the catastrophe and producing catharsis (emotional release) in the audience.
- The tragedy unravels outward as well, affecting not just the tragic hero but those around them.
- Moment of last suspense: unwinds previous tensions and provides story closure.
This more elaborated model of Freytag’s Pyramid, based by combining analysis of Shakespeare’s plays with Aristotle’s Poetics and Greek tragedy, looks like this:
Note how the climax occurs in the central act (#3) of the 5-Act structure, which suggests a model of narrative based more on symmetrical principles.
In most of these models introduced so far, there is a strong sense of there being a single Peak to the narrative (the climax) though as we have seen, in the Mogwai music video example, narratives often have multiple peaks and valleys. Longer narratives especially may have an overall arc toward one climactic moment, but that trajectory can be punctuated with multiple high and low tension moments. A model that tries to capture these multiple peaks and valleys is Breneman’s (from Once Upon a Time: a storytelling handbook):
This more ‘bumpy’ model of narrative also fits better the format of story ‘episodes’ whether from television or online ‘webisodes’ or even Netflix series designed for binge watching. A season may have its own arc that develops over many episodes, while within each episode there will be peaks and valleys nested within it.
Robert McKee is a well-known creative writing instructor who has written and lectured widely on narrative mostly from the perspective of Hollywood practices. For McKee, there conflicts play out along both conscious and unconscious dimensions, and a character’s psyche can be in conflict with inner and inter-personal crises while also engaged with issues in the larger world.
One of most commonly implemented (in popular culture at least) narrative models is Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which is another pattern used for shaping narrative conflict based on the comparative analysis of thousands of the worlds’ myths and folk stories, modeled by Joseph Campbell. The Hero’s journey is probably the most used model of narrative outside of Aristotle, who has the benefit of having written over two thousand year’s ago and so has had influence over a much longer period.
Of course, a core concept of the Hero’s Journey is that it’s a universal model that is very ancient and part of the deep wisdom of humanity, so it is not so much Campbell’s own personal model (i.e. his invention) but more of a discovery of patterns implicit across thousands of narratives produced over millennia of human history.
Today the Hero’s Journey is even more explicit than it used to be. While it was the model for shaping the original Star Wars stories, today’s trend of superhero movies just make what used to be implicit in narrative structure more overt. On this list of top grossing films, the vast majority are hero’s journey in structure, and many are literally superhero movies.
Here the model articulated diagrammatically.
Since the Hero’s Journey is up there with Aristotle’s Poetics as the most practically applied narrative model of all time, it’s worth it’s own video..
Another entertainment industry model in wide use is Michael Hague’s 6-stage model, which has as its perhaps most interesting feature the idea of assigning a percentage value to each of the stages, so that one knows how much story time to devote to each section. Incidentally, in screenplays 1 page of script is supposed to be equivalent to 1 minute of screen time (e.g. a 90-page screenplay = 90-minute movie), so the percentages can also be used as a guide for the number of pages to write.
Finally, Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet has gotten a lot of attention, mainly because so many blockbuster films (with ~$200m budgets etc.) use this as the safest way to create superhero and sci-fi movies that really need to earn a buck in order to please the investors. It is also criticized by film critics for imposing a stale uniformity on stories, so that these big budget films give us exactly what we expect them to, taking away audience pleasure in the theatre. Here’s an example of some of the beats:
B Story — This is when there’s a discussion about the Theme — the nugget of truth. Usually, this discussion is between the main character and the love interest. So, the B Story is usually called the “love story”.
The Promise of the Premise — This is the fun part of the story. This is when Craig Thompson’s relationship with Raina blooms, when Indiana Jones tries to beat the Nazis to the Lost Ark, when the detective finds the most clues and dodges the most bullets. This is when the main character explores the new world and the audience is entertained by the premise they have been promised.
Midpoint — Dependent upon the story, this moment is when everything is “great” or everything is “awful”. The main character either gets everything they think they want (“great”) or doesn’t get what they think they want at all (“awful”). But not everything we think we want is what we actually need in the end.
Bad Guys Close In — Doubt, jealousy, fear, foes both physical and emotional regroup to defeat the main character’s goal, and the main character’s “great”/“awful” situation disintegrates.
All is Lost — The opposite moment from the Midpoint: “awful”/“great”. The moment that the main character realizes they’ve lost everything they gained, or everything they now have has no meaning. The initial goal now looks even more impossible than before. And here, something or someone dies. It can be physical or emotional, but the death of something old makes way for something new to be born.
Dark Night of the Soul — The main character hits bottom, and wallows in hopelessness. The Why hast thou forsaken me, Lord? moment. Mourning the loss of what has “died” — the dream, the goal, the mentor character, the love of your life, etc. But, you must fall completely before you can pick yourself back up and try again.
Micro Arcs
You can even find ‘miniature arcs’ within very short segments of narrative, such as the setup and completion of a single action. Cohen (2013) calls this a ‘visual narrative grammar’ and illustrates micro arc sections (ways of dividing an action into a miniature arc sequence) with reference to comics and films, as shown below, in which moments can be labelled as Establishers, Initials, Peaks and Releases.
Non-Arc Structures
There are many, many other models of narrative, and the field of narrative theory becomes even more complex once one ads in more interactive and experimental or avant-garde perspectives, such as:
Cyclical
Cumulative
Closed Narrative
Multistrand Narrative
Nonlinear Stories
Episodic Narrative
A cyclical narrative is based on a loop. While rare as a narrative structure, there are some good examples of a loop structure — where the film ends at the same place as it began– such as the film 12 Monkeys based on the classic Chris Marker film La Jetée. Here’s a short film, Salaryman 6, based on a loop structure.
A cumulative narrative builds its effect from repetition. Sometimes this is called a chain tale. Doctor Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham are a good example of this kind of story structure:
I AM SAM. I AM SAM. SAM I AM.
THAT SAM-I-AM! THAT SAM-I-AM! I DO NOT LIKE THAT SAM-I-AM!
DO WOULD YOU LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM?
I DO NOT LIKE THEM,SAM-I-AM.
I DO NOT LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM.WOULD YOU LIKE THEM HERE OR THERE?
I WOULD NOT LIKE THEM HERE OR THERE.
I WOULD NOT LIKE THEM ANYWHERE.
I DO NOT LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM.
I DO NOT LIKE THEM, SAM-I-AM.WOULD YOU LIKE THEM IN A HOUSE?
WOULD YOU LIKE THEN WITH A MOUSE?I DO NOT LIKE THEM IN A HOUSE.
I DO NOT LIKE THEM WITH A MOUSE.
I DO NOT LIKE THEM HERE OR THERE.
I DO NOT LIKE THEM ANYWHERE.
I DO NOT LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM.
I DO NOT LIKE THEM, SAM-I-AM.
A closed narrative compresses a lot of time into a short delivery format (e.g. 2 hours showing 20 years of time), has a relatively ‘tight’ reading (e.g. doesn’t have too many possibilities for interpretation), and employs a lot of music in the soundtrack that tells us how to feel at any given moment. The ending produces a strong sense of closure, unless its a franchise in which case the closure sets up the next round of story.
Open narratives have many characters and no foreseeable ending, as in soap opera television series. They are multi-stranded stories (many plot lines happening at once) and told in a chronological order.
Multi-strand narratives are made up of many simultaneous stories (e.g. the film Love Actually which has 8 story strands linking at the end). Through narrative juxtaposition the audience becomes interested in the outcomes of all the stories.
Nonlinear narratives jump around in time a lot, for instance through flashbacks, jump cutting or time travel.
Episodic narratives are considered to be ‘loose’ structures. The original Star Trek tv series would be a good example of this format, often offering plots such as:
a starship wanders deep uncharted space, and every now and then they encounter aliens and interesting stuff starts to happen. Otherwise the ship’s crew members are pretty bored, filling out captain’s logs and just keeping the ship very clean.
Character, Traits, Action
To put you back for a moment into passive viewing mode, have a quick look at these cute cartoon faces:
OK, now for the activity part. Think of some actual person that you know, and make a list of the character traits that define them. But what is a defining trait?
The most compelling traits are ones that relate to the inner life of the characters — their motivations, goals, dreams, desires, fears, anxieties, insecurities. Let’s call these character traits. We will distinguish character traits from what we can call revealing traits. For our purposes, let’s say that a revealing trait is some external aspect of character, such as:
- Their evident social class (rich, poor, or rich but dresses poor rebelliously)
- Their age (or apparent age, signs of plastic surgery, older people dyeing their hair, or not)
- Their physical appearance (freckly, chubby, hairy, muscular, hair color)
- Their social communication codes (how stylish they are, or aren’t — clothing sometimes, though not always, can say a lot)
- Their gestures (slouchy, animated, wall flower– body language in general)
- Their tastes (music they like, food they hate)
- Their possessions (wearing lots of bling, the car they drive, or lack of possessions)
For this exercise, a character trait is not one of these revealing traits or appearance-based traits, but rather we want to focus on the personality and psychology of the characters. Get into what makes them tick and avoid superficial aspects like ethnicity, possessions, height or clothing. So take a moment and write down your list of character traits of some actual person you know.
… … …
Now I will assume you have your list of traits and then ask you, why do you say that this person has these traits? It’s a trick question because there’s only one answer. Conflicts cause people to act, which then shows us who they are (what character ‘stuff’ they are made of!). When conflict occurs, what do people do? What do they say? That gives us insight into their traits.
As a narrative creator (or generally, ‘author’ which doesn’t mean just someone who writes books but can be applied to any medium), you know what your characters are made of, but then you have to design their actions, so that the audience can find out what you already know! The audience would be bored if you just gave them a list of your characters’ traits. Instead, they want to see characters act, so they can find out their inner character.
It would not be very effective, in a Star Wars novel (who reads these anyway??) to write:
“Darth Vader was a very bad guy. Because he was bad he wore black. Everyone was scared of him even though black was still considered to be a very fashionable color in a galaxy far far away a long long time ago.”
Traits aren’t very powerful or interesting when they are just directly stated, but are more compelling when illustrated by actions:
Darth Vader removed his helmet and set it next to the bathroom sink. While flicking the button of his electric toothbrush, which reminded him of his light saber, he thought of those Death Star officers elsewhere on the base whose black boots weren’t shined properly.
As he angled the humming electric wand toward the back of his Sith molars, making sure to massage his gums properly, he began to feel enraged that he could spare time to brush his teeth, but the Imperial Officers could not find time to polish their boots.
Just by thinking these thoughts, he would find out later on his Facebook page that those very officers he had been thinking about had swallowed their own electric toothbrushes that morning, due to the power of the Force’s dark side.
So we still get the picture here that Darth is a bad Sith dude, even when he is doing something as innocuous as brushing his teeth, because his actions are evil even when they are just random thoughts that occur to him while performing bodily hygiene. Actions show the traits to the reader, whereas I, as the author, know that Darth is such a bad guy, that I have to design actions to illustrate this point to the audience.
Based on what we’ve covered on narrative progression as driven by character conflict, if you don’t mind standard PG-rated movie violence, you might find this short film below to be interesting in its clear plot sectioning, and the odd (and humorous, and occasionally violent) mixture of intense inner emotional and external action-based conflict. If you treat it as an active viewing exercise, you can also ask:
- What are the sources of conflict between and within characters?
- What repeats (motifs) throughout the film?
- How might you draw out the peaks and valleys of its arc?
- What conflicts are caused by the characters’ traits?
- What conflicts have other causes?
You can create your own worksheet based on the diagram below as you watch the short film.
Character Interactions
Another way to think about what drives narrative progression is that it takes two to tango. That’s a cliché, sorry, but what is meant is that a single character is like an inert substance, where not much happens, but if you add another substance, a reaction occurs (ok, I said it was inert, but now it’s reactive, I’m mixing the metaphor) because another character has shown up on the scene! Now that you have two characters, stuff can happen.
Imagine a tree, just there in the grass. Pretty boring.
Now, add a boy to the tree, and you get The Giving Tree (click on the image below to view).
Note that the title is a character trait, referring to the generosity trait of main character #1 (the tree). The story could also be called The Needy Boy or the Selfish Kid or even The Non-Reciprocating Male (main character #2) but then it would be a mean kind of story and it wouldn’t make us feel good. Usually we want narratives to make us feel not bad, so here we shift the narratorial focus to the nice pleasing positive giving-ness of a totally self-sacrificing plant.
This ‘two to tango’ structure is everywhere in narrative, if you know how to look for it. Bilbo in the Shire is a lazy hobbit living a boring easy life. It takes a Gandalf to show up to send him on his adventure, and catalyze something narrative-worthy out of his inert Shire substance.
Earth orbiting the Sun in a void is pretty boring, but gets excitingly conflictual if aliens show up to invade it.
So this chemistry metaphor works pretty well actually, to describe how you can spark a chain reaction of events, once you have character + character (and theoretically you can always split one person into multiple personalities to get the same results).
This is why you sometimes see scientific paradigms, like cybernetics and systems theory, used to describe narrative structure, such as with Todorov’s equilibrium theory of narrative. For a systems thinker like Todorov, narrative works in a very similar fashion as the thermostat in your home! (or, your body temperature, etc.). Narratives start out in homeostasis (often literally at home! hence the italics in the first part of the word), which gets disturbed, and the goal is then to return to homeostasis.
Of course, very often the ‘chemistry’ in a narrative is more obviously illustrated with love interests, which definitely transforms inert substances into chain reactions of events.
Because of the importance of action (which drive causal chains of events), characters are often more like narrative functions than people. For example, in Skyfall, Love Interest #1 gets killed, which frees up a narrative opening for Love Interest #2, because the love interest is a general narrative function and integral to plot templates of this kind.
So-called Bollywood cinema has an interesting variation of the love triangle concept by making a love quadrangle out of the general situation. It’s a common plot structure that a Man wants a Woman, but to get her, he has to Defeat the Villain on order to win the Woman’s Father’s Approval. So, it’s a bit harder to be a Bollywood hero, since on top of this added complication they have to sing and dance a lot, which maybe explains the long length of some of these film narratives?
So the love interest character type is also a general narrative function guaranteeing a bit more chemistry in the propulsion of narrative action. These types are not just characters, but plot drivers, engines to move actions along arc coordinates.
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