Keep Climbing
Keep Climbing
Imagine you’re telling someone a story. A group of friends around a dinner table, a colleague at work. You think the story is interesting or else you wouldn’t have begun it. And this is how it goes:
“This morning I was in the coffee shop I always go to before work and a man walked in and joined the queue behind me. He was clearly in a rush and started to vocalise his impatience. ‘I have a train to catch,’ he said. ’So do I,’ said a man a few people ahead in the queue. There was only one server behind the counter and he was clearly new, being trained by a manager. The impatient man stepped out of the line and went to the front of the queue - ‘Look,’ he said to the woman currently being served, ‘can I just go in front of you? I’m really late.’ The woman demurred as other people, including me, began to complain. Suddenly the man pulled out a gun and pointed it at the server. ‘Get me an espresso, now,’ he said as the woman at the front of the queue screamed, lowering into a crouch, and everyone in the coffee shop fell silent. Behind the counter the manager took over from the inexperienced server, but in his nervousness as he turned from the machine, putting on the cup’s lid, he fumbled and the cup dropped to the floor, spilling all the coffee. The gunman swore. As everyone held their breath, he straightened the arm that held the gun. ‘What time is it?’ he yelled. No one answered. ‘Someone tell me what time it is!’ he yelled, louder, and I glanced down at my phone. ‘8:35,’ I said. The gunman sighed. ‘Forget it,’ he said, lowering the gun. ‘I’ll just get a coffee later.’ And he left the cafe, apologising as he exited.”
So how was that story for you? A little bit of a let-down at the end? In this small format it’s not too annoying, because we can just think how strange, and wonder about the man. What was going on in his life, what happened in the rest of his day, had he done this kind of thing before?
But imagine if you had been reading a novel for a few hundred pages, you’d invested in the desires and actions of a character, and something similar to this arc occurred. How would you feel about it?
This leads me to a piece of really important advice found in Robert McKee’s STORY:
A story must NOT retreat to actions of lesser quality or magnitude, but move progressively forward to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another.
Remember that an Inciting Incident launches your main character on a quest to somehow restore life’s balance. At the start this might involve small, conservative actions, in expectation of a quick, positive response. But when the effect of these actions doesn’t turn out as planned, instead perhaps creating new pressures, a gap widens between Expectation and Result.
This is the first of many Points of No Return. Small actions haven’t been effective and so the protagonist is forced to take a second, more difficult but still fairly moderate action. Again, the desired affect is not achieved, opening a second gap between expectation and result. The protagonist must once again adjust to changed circumstances and now take an action that demands even more willpower and personal capacity, an action that is stronger, bolder, in order to finally achieve the desired result.
One of the most common problems in so-called ‘soggy middles’ is that the writer starts to run out of ideas.
Having perhaps given us a highly exciting first response to an Inciting Incident, the writer now reverts to lesser actions from the protagonist, actions more conservative than what’s been done before, or actions similar to the ones before, actions that did not achieve the desired result. If these actions weren’t successful the first time, we readers wonder, why are they being tried again? We already know they won’t achieve what the character wants, and so our interest begins to flag.
The moral is: Keep pushing your characters.
Whatever they did last time when faced with opposition, their next action needs to top it. More risk, more courage required.
Keep them climbing!
All the way to the final peak, where the cumulative effect of their choices will at last be resolved.