The Anatomy of Story (5 page)

Death of a Salesman

(by Arthur Miller; 194V)
Tin- central challenge for Arthur Miller is to turn the life of a small man into a grand tragedy. Problems he must solve include mixing past and present events without confusing the audience, maintaining narrative drive, and providing hope in a desperate and violent conclusion.

Step 4: Find the Designing Principle

Given the problems and the promises inherent in your idea, you must now come up with an overall strategy for how you will tell your story. Your overall story strategy, stated in one line, is the designing principle of your story. The designing principle helps you extend the premise into deep structure.

KEY POINT: The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole.

It is the internal logic of the story, what makes the parts hang together

organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It is

what makes the story original.

In short, the designing principle is the seed of the story. And it is the single most important factor in making your story original and effective. Sometimes this principle is a symbol or a metaphor (known as the central symbol, the grand metaphor, or the root metaphor). But it is often larger than that. The designing principle tracks the fundamental process that will unfold over the course of the story.

The designing principle is difficult to see. And in truth, most stories don't have one. They are standard stories, told generically. That's the difference between a premise, which all stories have, and a designing principle—which only good stories have. The premise is concrete; it's what actually happens. The designing principle is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way. Stated in one line:

Designing principle = story process + original execution

Let's say you are a writer who wants to show the intimate workings of the Mafia in America, as literally hundreds of screenwriters and novelists

have done. If you were really good, you might come up with this designing principle (for
The Godfather):

Use the classic fairy-tale strategy of showing how the youngest of three sons becomes the new "king."

What's important is that the designing principle is the "synthesizing idea," the "shaping cause"
¹
of the story; it's what internally makes the story a single unit and what makes it different from all other stories.

KEY POINT:
Find the designing principle, and stick to it. Be diligent in discovering this principle, and never take your eye off it during the long writing process.

Let's take a look at
Tootsie
to see how the difference between the premise and the designing principle plays out in an actual story.

■ Premise
When an actor can't get work, he disguises himself as a woman and gets a role in a TV series, only to fall in love with one of the female members of the cast.

■ Designing Principle
Force a male chauvinist to live as a woman.

How do you find the designing principle in your premise? Don't make the mistake most writers make at this point. Instead of coming up with a unique designing principle, they pick a genre and impose it on the premise and then force the story to hit the beats (events) typical of that genre. The result is mechanical, generic, unoriginal fiction.

You find the designing principle by teasing it out of the simple one-line premise you have before you. Like a detective, you "induce" the form of the story from the premise.

This doesn't mean that there is only one designing principle per idea or that it's fixed or predetermined. There are many possible designing principles or forms that you can glean from your premise and by which you can develop your story. Each gives you different possibilities of what to say, and each brings inherent problems that you must solve. Again, let your technique help you out.

One way of coming up with a designing principle is to use a journey or similar traveling metaphor. Huck Finn's raft trip down the Mississippi River with Jim, Marlow's boat trip up the river into the "heart of darkness," Leopold Bloom's travels through Dublin in
Ulysses,
Alice's fall down the rabbit hole into the upside-down world of Wonderland—each of these uses a traveling metaphor to organize the deeper process of the story.

Notice how the use of a journey in
Heart of Darkness
provides the designing principle for a very complex work of fiction:

A storyteller's trip upriver into the jungle is the line to three different locations simultaneously: to the truth about a mysterious and apparently immoral man; to the truth about the storyteller himself; and backward in civilization to the barbaric moral heart of darkness in all humans.

Sometimes a single symbol can serve as the designing principle, as with the red letter
A
in
The Scarlet Letter,
the island in
The Tempest,
the whale in
Moby-Dick,
or the mountain in
The Magic Mountain.
Or you can connect two grand symbols in a process, like the green nature and black slag of
How Green Was My Valley.
Other designing principles include units of time (day, night, four seasons), the unique use of a storyteller, or a special way the story unfolds.

Here are some designing principles in books, films, and plays, from the Bible all the way to the Harry Potter books, and how they differ from the premise line.

Moses, in the Book of Exodus
■ Premise
When an Egyptian prince discovers that he is a Hebrew, he leads his people out of slavery.

■ Designing Principle
A man who does not know who he is struggles to lead his people to freedom and receives the new moral laws that will define him and his people.

Ulysses

■ Premise
Track a day in the life of a common man in Dublin.

■ Designing Principle
In a modern odyssey through the city, over the

course of a single day, one man finds a father and the other man finds a son.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

■ Premise
A man falls in love with a woman, but first one and then the other is engaged to someone else.

■ Designing Principle
A group of friends experiences four Utopias (weddings) and a moment in hell (funeral) as they all look for their right partner in marriage.

Harry Potter Books

■ Premise
A boy discovers he has magical powers and attends a school for magicians.

■ Designing Principle
A magician prince learns to be a man and a king by attending a boarding school for sorcerers over the course of seven school years.

The Sting

■ Premise
Two con artists swindle a rich man who killed one of their friends.

■ Designing Principle
Tell the story of a sting in the form of a sting, and con both the opponent and the audience.

Long Day's Journey into Night

■ Premise
A family deals with the mother's addiction.

■ Designing Principle
As a family moves from day into night, its members are confronted with the sins and ghosts of their past.

Meet Me in St. Louis

■ Premise
A young woman falls in love with the boy next door.

■ Designing Principle
The growth of a family over the course of a year is shown by events in each of the four seasons.

Copenhagen

■ Premise
Three people tell conflicting versions of a meeting that changed the outcome of World War II.

■ Designing Principle
Use the Heisenberg uncertainty principle from physics to explore the ambiguous morality of the man who discovered it.

A Christmas Carol

■ Premise
When three ghosts visit a stingy old man, he regains the spirit of Christmas.

■ Designing Principle
Trace the rebirth of a man by forcing him to view his past, his present, and his future over the course of one Christmas Eve.

It's a Wonderful Life

■ Premise
When a man prepares to commit suicide, an angel shows him what the world would be had he never been born.

■ Designing Principle
Express the power of the individual by
showing
what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never lived.

Citizen Kane

■ Premise
Tell the life story of a rich newspaper baron.

■ Designing Principle
Use a number of storytellers to show that a man's life can never be known.

Step 5: Determine Your Best Character in the Idea

Once you have a lock on the designing principle of your story, it's time to focus on your hero.

KEY POINT:
Always tell a story about your best character.

"Best" doesn't mean "nicest." It means "the most fascinating, challenging, and complex," even if that character isn't particularly likable. The reason you want to tell a story about your best character is that this is where your interest, and the audience's interest, will inevitably go. You always want this character driving the action.

The way you determine the best character embedded in the idea is to ask yourself this crucial question: Who do I love? You can find the answer by asking yourself a few more questions: Do I want to see him act? Do I love the way he thinks? Do I care about the challenges he has to overcome?

If you can't find a character you love implied in the story idea, move on to another idea. If you find him but he is not currently the main character, change the premise right now so that he is.

If you are developing an idea that seems to have multiple main characters, you will have as many story lines as main characters, and so you must find the best character for each story line.

Step 6: Get a Sense of the Central Conflict

Once you have an idea of who will drive the story, you want to figure out what your story is about at the most essential level. That means determining the central conflict of the story. To figure out the central conflict, ask yourself "Who fights whom over what?" and answer the question in one succinct line.

The answer to that is what your story is really about, because all conflict in the story will essentially boil down to this one issue. The next two chapters will expand on this conflict in often complex ways. But you need to keep this one-line statement of conflict, along with the designing principle, in front of you at all times.

Step 7: Get a Sense of the Single Cause-and-Effect Pathway

Every good, organic story has a single cause-and-effect pathway: A leads to B, which leads to C, and so on all the way to Z. This is the spine of the story, and if you don't have a spine or you have too many spines, your story will fall apart (we'll talk about multiple-hero stories in a moment). Let's say you came up with this premise:

A man falls in love and fights his brother for control of a winery.

Notice that this is a split premise with two cause-and-effect trajectories. One of the great advantages of using these techniques to develop your premise is that it's much easier to spot problems and find solutions when you've written only one line. Once you write a full story or script, the story problems feel like they're set in concrete. But when you've written only one sentence, you can make a simple change and turn a split premise into a single line, such as this:

Through the love of a good woman, a man defeats his brother for control of a winery.

The trick to finding the single cause-and-effect pathway is to ask yourself "What is my hero's basic action?" Your hero will take many actions over the course of the story. But there should be one action that is most important, that unifies every other action the hero takes. That action is the cause-and-effect path.

For example, let's go back to the one-line premise for
Star Wars:

When a princess falls into mortal danger, a young man uses his skills as a fighter to save her and defeat the evil forces of a galactic empire.