How many ways are there to tell a story? (inspired by Pulp Fiction)
May 5th 2008 00:19
I watched Pulp Fiction again on Saturday night to drown out the squealing, high-heeled party our twenty-something neighbours were having upstairs. (The revelry of childless professionals is a thing of rare narcissism.) Tarantino’s gruesome genius with all that thumping gunfire and mother****ing expletives thankfully got me to midnight without the indignity of having to bang on their door in a wild huff and my PJ’s confirming that I am, very much ‘out of it.’
Pulp Fiction got me thinking afresh about storytelling. With only so many themes (love, revenge, betrayal, greed, hubris) in the basket of Things to Tell, I’ve really come to the conclusion that the How of storytelling is where the real magic lies. How we choose to tell a story, commonly referred to as the PLOT signifies the arrangement of events which moves the story, and the readers or viewers along with it. Plot is what creates the compulsion or momentum for us to carry on reading or watching.
In Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster writes,
A plot is … a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot…. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story, we say ‘and then…?’ If it is in a plot, we ask, ‘why?’
The first time I watched Pulp Fiction sometime in 1995, it did two things: it rekindled my raw sexual hunger for John Travolta that Grease inspired when I was probably a little too young to have sexual hunger, and it taught me a few things about how to tell an interesting story.
Great movies, like Pulp Fiction can teach us writers a thing or two about playfulness when it comes to the plot. How to tell a story is the art of knowing when to reveal what. Where to start. Where to end. Sometimes a plot is so beautifully constructed it seems the results of the fine-motor co-ordination of a brain-surgeon and the timing sensibilities of a music composer. Because structure participates in creating meaning, our story will change depending on how we tell it. No matter what age-old themes we use, the particular configuration of events - like words on a page, like notes in a musical score, is potentially limitless.
In school, it was drummed into my head by well-meaning but desperately unimaginative English teachers that all sentences need a subject, verb and object. In my teens, I rebelled against this grammatical hegemony but to my detriment. All good sentences really do need a subject, a verb and an object. That is, if you care about taking your readers or viewers along with you. It’s okay (in the right hands even artistry) to make the reader or viewer work for meaning – to strain through ellipses in sequence, or to ‘fill in the gaps.’ But if we make our readers or viewers work too hard we risk becoming pretentious and obscure.
Similarly, all stories have beginnings, middles and endings. But we don’t need to start, as Julie Andrews sings in The Sound of Music, ‘at the very beginning…’ A story can start anywhere. A beginning is nothing more than the writer’s whim about where to start the telling. Similarly, the end is not a place, it’s a pause. It’s where the writer chooses to shut up and say no more. (‘And they all lived happily ever after – that’s a beginning if ever I heard one…) The End is an emotional space in which we want our readers or viewers to end up. There are many ways to lead an audience to our designated destination. Each choice of beginning, middle and ending changes both the meaning of our story and the effect it has on the audience.
1. The Linear Storyline: front to back
This is the cleanest method of storytelling, it doesn’t ask too much of your reader, you won’t lose your reader in the knotted ball of wool of your story threads. Most18th and 19th century biographical novels start with the birth of the protagonist and end with his or her death. To set up tension here, you have to keep the reader wanting to know ‘what happened next?’ Historical dramas or stories which are themselves situated in linear time are often told in linear fashion, with the use of THE FLASHBACK to create embedded meaning.
2. Start with the End Storyline
By starting with the ending, we alert the audience about the purpose of the narrative – its driving compulsion towards this denouement. This is the writer’s statement upfront: ‘here is where our story ends.’ Is this a spoiler? Not really. Knowing how the action resolves, does not prepare the audience for how they will end up emotionally. Skilful plotting may show the end at the beginning, but will transform the audience in the journey to that place so that narrative objective will become the altered impact of the ending (at the end). In some scripts, (I’m thinking now of The Illusionist and The Prestige) we are shown a scene early on when it has one meaning, and then again later when its meaning has fundamentally altered by what we as viewers already know.
Just about all murder mysteries or thrillers rely on this method of telling so that the audience asks – how did he die? Why? What happened?’ These curiosities and questions keep the audience turning pages or glued to the screen.
3. The Twist
Another technique is to hold the ending back, and to keep the audience in suspense, so they never know when we’re going to drop that final curtain. Here’s where we can jerk the audience around with various ‘twists’ – just as they sense a particular revelation or resolution, we turn it around. And again. And again. Jodi Picoult is fond of this culminating gesture, which relies on inverting the expectations you have built in the preceding text or scenes.
4. Back-To-Front Stories
One of the most challenging structures in storytelling is the story told backwards. The ‘beginning’ has almost no meaning to the reader, because the antecedent process of how a character ends up in particular place is unrevealed at the outset. The movie Memento is a memorable example of this. My poor husband got lost after five minutes and interrupted my viewing with persistent queries like, ‘what the **** is going on?’
5. Parallel storylines
This method is used to create contrast and incremental revelations, often with a historical story moving alongside the present story. Some of my favourite books use this brilliantly, such as Ron Mclarty's Memory of Running.
6. Non-linear interwoven storylines
In Pulp Fiction, there are several interwoven storylines which amount to:
* Two hitmen hunt down a briefcase stolen from their boss, and end up making a mess of things.
* While the boss is out of town, one of them takes his wife out for a night on the town, but the evening goes horribly wrong.
* A boxer has been told to throw his fight, but kills his opponent in the ring instead and is now on the run.
* And two lovebirds decide to rob a restaurant.
Tarantino weaves a non-linear, fragmented storyline which hops all over the place. The opening scene in the restaurant is interrupted, frozen just at the point that it gets interesting. We are then taken through a series of interlinking middle scenes. The final scene overlaps with the opening scene and resolves this first scene, appearing to make the structure circular, except that Vince (Travolta), who walks out of the restaurant in the final scene has died in a scene halfway through the movie.
Pulp Fiction is largely character and dialogue driven, giving Tarantino much more room to play with sequencing and overlaps, which start to make sense as the movie progresses.
In the hands of a less talented director, this movie could have been a hodge podge of tales. But Tarantino, the maestro of the narrative maneuver, keeps control of the plot at all times, winding us forwards, then backwards, then forwards. Where we end, is somewhere in the middle. There’s something about the lawlessness of this and its ridicule of the anarchy of linear time that appeals to me.
When we write, we make choices about what to reveal and conceal and it is this dance of disclosure and secrecy that creates the emotional journey for the reader or viewer. How we link sequences gives meaning to those moments, because all good writing builds depth, as different scenes reflect off one another.
However we choose to structure our plot, the golden thread has to be coherence. As long as the material doesn’t run away from us, teetering our story into ever-widening wobbles of narration, we can tell the story back-to-front (Memento), in fragments that will later coalesce (Babel, Crash), or just plain straight – from start to finish.
Options for storytelling and plot are endless. Each choice works a different semantic muscle, and demarcates the experience for the reader or viewer. Understanding this dynamic as writers helps us to delicately explore the subtetlies of storytelling.
www.joannefedler.com
Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction got me thinking afresh about storytelling. With only so many themes (love, revenge, betrayal, greed, hubris) in the basket of Things to Tell, I’ve really come to the conclusion that the How of storytelling is where the real magic lies. How we choose to tell a story, commonly referred to as the PLOT signifies the arrangement of events which moves the story, and the readers or viewers along with it. Plot is what creates the compulsion or momentum for us to carry on reading or watching.
In Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster writes,
A plot is … a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot…. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story, we say ‘and then…?’ If it is in a plot, we ask, ‘why?’
The first time I watched Pulp Fiction sometime in 1995, it did two things: it rekindled my raw sexual hunger for John Travolta that Grease inspired when I was probably a little too young to have sexual hunger, and it taught me a few things about how to tell an interesting story.
John Travolta in Pulp Fiction
Great movies, like Pulp Fiction can teach us writers a thing or two about playfulness when it comes to the plot. How to tell a story is the art of knowing when to reveal what. Where to start. Where to end. Sometimes a plot is so beautifully constructed it seems the results of the fine-motor co-ordination of a brain-surgeon and the timing sensibilities of a music composer. Because structure participates in creating meaning, our story will change depending on how we tell it. No matter what age-old themes we use, the particular configuration of events - like words on a page, like notes in a musical score, is potentially limitless.
In school, it was drummed into my head by well-meaning but desperately unimaginative English teachers that all sentences need a subject, verb and object. In my teens, I rebelled against this grammatical hegemony but to my detriment. All good sentences really do need a subject, a verb and an object. That is, if you care about taking your readers or viewers along with you. It’s okay (in the right hands even artistry) to make the reader or viewer work for meaning – to strain through ellipses in sequence, or to ‘fill in the gaps.’ But if we make our readers or viewers work too hard we risk becoming pretentious and obscure.
Similarly, all stories have beginnings, middles and endings. But we don’t need to start, as Julie Andrews sings in The Sound of Music, ‘at the very beginning…’ A story can start anywhere. A beginning is nothing more than the writer’s whim about where to start the telling. Similarly, the end is not a place, it’s a pause. It’s where the writer chooses to shut up and say no more. (‘And they all lived happily ever after – that’s a beginning if ever I heard one…) The End is an emotional space in which we want our readers or viewers to end up. There are many ways to lead an audience to our designated destination. Each choice of beginning, middle and ending changes both the meaning of our story and the effect it has on the audience.
1. The Linear Storyline: front to back
This is the cleanest method of storytelling, it doesn’t ask too much of your reader, you won’t lose your reader in the knotted ball of wool of your story threads. Most18th and 19th century biographical novels start with the birth of the protagonist and end with his or her death. To set up tension here, you have to keep the reader wanting to know ‘what happened next?’ Historical dramas or stories which are themselves situated in linear time are often told in linear fashion, with the use of THE FLASHBACK to create embedded meaning.
2. Start with the End Storyline
By starting with the ending, we alert the audience about the purpose of the narrative – its driving compulsion towards this denouement. This is the writer’s statement upfront: ‘here is where our story ends.’ Is this a spoiler? Not really. Knowing how the action resolves, does not prepare the audience for how they will end up emotionally. Skilful plotting may show the end at the beginning, but will transform the audience in the journey to that place so that narrative objective will become the altered impact of the ending (at the end). In some scripts, (I’m thinking now of The Illusionist and The Prestige) we are shown a scene early on when it has one meaning, and then again later when its meaning has fundamentally altered by what we as viewers already know.
Just about all murder mysteries or thrillers rely on this method of telling so that the audience asks – how did he die? Why? What happened?’ These curiosities and questions keep the audience turning pages or glued to the screen.
3. The Twist
Another technique is to hold the ending back, and to keep the audience in suspense, so they never know when we’re going to drop that final curtain. Here’s where we can jerk the audience around with various ‘twists’ – just as they sense a particular revelation or resolution, we turn it around. And again. And again. Jodi Picoult is fond of this culminating gesture, which relies on inverting the expectations you have built in the preceding text or scenes.
4. Back-To-Front Stories
One of the most challenging structures in storytelling is the story told backwards. The ‘beginning’ has almost no meaning to the reader, because the antecedent process of how a character ends up in particular place is unrevealed at the outset. The movie Memento is a memorable example of this. My poor husband got lost after five minutes and interrupted my viewing with persistent queries like, ‘what the **** is going on?’
Memento
5. Parallel storylines
This method is used to create contrast and incremental revelations, often with a historical story moving alongside the present story. Some of my favourite books use this brilliantly, such as Ron Mclarty's Memory of Running.
Memory of Running by Ron Mclarty
6. Non-linear interwoven storylines
In Pulp Fiction, there are several interwoven storylines which amount to:
* Two hitmen hunt down a briefcase stolen from their boss, and end up making a mess of things.
* While the boss is out of town, one of them takes his wife out for a night on the town, but the evening goes horribly wrong.
* A boxer has been told to throw his fight, but kills his opponent in the ring instead and is now on the run.
* And two lovebirds decide to rob a restaurant.
Tarantino weaves a non-linear, fragmented storyline which hops all over the place. The opening scene in the restaurant is interrupted, frozen just at the point that it gets interesting. We are then taken through a series of interlinking middle scenes. The final scene overlaps with the opening scene and resolves this first scene, appearing to make the structure circular, except that Vince (Travolta), who walks out of the restaurant in the final scene has died in a scene halfway through the movie.
Pulp Fiction is largely character and dialogue driven, giving Tarantino much more room to play with sequencing and overlaps, which start to make sense as the movie progresses.
In the hands of a less talented director, this movie could have been a hodge podge of tales. But Tarantino, the maestro of the narrative maneuver, keeps control of the plot at all times, winding us forwards, then backwards, then forwards. Where we end, is somewhere in the middle. There’s something about the lawlessness of this and its ridicule of the anarchy of linear time that appeals to me.
When we write, we make choices about what to reveal and conceal and it is this dance of disclosure and secrecy that creates the emotional journey for the reader or viewer. How we link sequences gives meaning to those moments, because all good writing builds depth, as different scenes reflect off one another.
However we choose to structure our plot, the golden thread has to be coherence. As long as the material doesn’t run away from us, teetering our story into ever-widening wobbles of narration, we can tell the story back-to-front (Memento), in fragments that will later coalesce (Babel, Crash), or just plain straight – from start to finish.
Options for storytelling and plot are endless. Each choice works a different semantic muscle, and demarcates the experience for the reader or viewer. Understanding this dynamic as writers helps us to delicately explore the subtetlies of storytelling.
www.joannefedler.com
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Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
Science News
Hunt Famous
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Fat Cult
Techbreak
And excuse my language, but this is just so goddamn perfect:
I'm childless, too, and nonprofessional, but the revelry is nauseating at times.
About Pulp Fiction: Tarantino really captured audiences with his non-linear storyline and the excessive use of style. My generation credited him as a genius, but he was really just paying a tribute to filmmakers that he loved. Still enjoyable to this day, though.
The fragmented storyline has been overused in recent times, though, with directors opting for this effect as a synthetic method of making a movie seem edgy.
A movie that uses reverse time flow fantastically well is Irreversible by Gasper Noe, I think.
Comment by Joanne Fedler
Secret Writers Business
I also think the fragmented storyline has been overused, and if not done with skill, it just comes off as pretentious and obscure. I suspect its sometimes employed by lazy writers, to baffle good people into thinking 'I don't get this, it must be clever...' when in fact, it's just sloppy.
I have nothing against childless professionals - or non-professionals for that matter. But they really do party with a narcissism I forfeited with that first nappy change.
Jo
Comment by Michaelie
Flick Wit
Momento - I had to watch it twice before I even began to grasp what the hell was going on. I spent most of the movie asking my then boyfriend 'what's he doing? who's that? is this before or after?'
Pulp - Adore it. And Cibb, of course Tarantino is laying tribute, that's what he does best, but there is still an element of genius in his execution, I believe!
Irreversible - I agree with Cibb, a fantastic film and perfect example of starting from the end and going backwards... without losing anyone in the process. Very cleverly mastered. Bryn got me onto it. Here's his review.
Michaelie
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Comment by Joanne Fedler
Secret Writers Business
Thanks JohnDoe. What a gent.
Jo
Comment by tlcorbin
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Comment by Joanne Fedler
Secret Writers Business
Jo
Comment by tlcorbin
Coffee Quip
A Global Citizen
Paranormal Paranormal
Is Why
Alaska Chronicle
Sleezer's World
Raven
Comment by Mrs M
Mum's Word
Here are the following movies that if I had written the screenplay I would be giving myself a pat on the back.
Love Actually
A Few Good Men
The Big Chill
Great post.
I like the quote from EM Forster. It's simple things like this that can create clarity. It seems like an obvious thing but so often simple things get confused. I'm simple and I often get confused
Love & stuff
Mrs M