Beyond the Hero's Journey E-Book

Anthony Mullins

• Herausgeber: Creative Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 388

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Telling a story is simple, right? You take a 'hero' and send them on a 'journey'. There's a beginning, middle and an end. But what if your story doesn't fit into that basic structure? In Beyond the Hero's Journey, BAFTA award-winning screenwriter Anthony Mullins champions one of the most powerful, yet most misunderstood, tools in a writer's toolkit - character arcs. Looking at celebrated films from around the world - including Moonlight, Lady Bird, The Social Network, The Godfather, A Fantastic Woman, Mulholland Drive, Shoplifters, Amour, Inside Llewyn Davis, Call Me By Your Name, Midsommar and The Father - he shows how character arcs not only create the 'emotional shape' of a story, but also offer writers of all levels an incredible variety of narratives that go far beyond the traditional, three-act Hero's Journey. For every writer who has ever felt frustrated by the neat confines of 'how to' guides, the book will teach you how to excel in telling more complex, original and authentic stories, and how to share your own distinctive voice with the world.

Leseprobe

Praise for Beyond The Hero’s Journey

‘Essential. Don’t start writing scripts without it. And if you’re writing scripts already, read it to explode every existing assumption. Modern, relevant, fresh, this book unpacks the shows and movies we’re watching now. Anthony Mullins isn’t just someone who inhales stories, but gets what they’re doing – and nails what we can learn from them. There’s so much here I wish I knew when I started screenwriting. Hell, there’s so much that’s helped me refine the TV show I’m writing… right now’ – Benjamin Law, creator/writer of The Family Law

‘Beyond The Hero’s Journey will inspire you to rethink screenwriting. Written in a readable, conversational voice and drawing on Hollywood, independent and international scripting examples, it challenges us to focus on character arcs as the screenplay’s central organising principle. It finds in arcs not only external action, but the deepest levels of internal characterisation. I cannot recommend Anthony Mullins’ approach enough; he has found a powerful path to the heart of story’ – Jeff Rush, co-author of Alternative Scriptwriting: Beyond the Hollywood Formula

‘For decades now, screenwriting manuals have almost religiously followed the principles of “the hero’s journey” and the “three-act structure”. Both great frameworks… but only for a certain type of storytelling. In this “peak TV” era of long-form, ensemble storytelling, with its non-linear structures and anti-heroes, writers are crying out for new ways of analysing story. In this hugely engaging book, Anthony Mullins breaks down an extraordinary array of films, unveiling new analytical tools that are insightful, practical and, best of all, that just might inspire you to write something genuinely original’ – Michael Lucas, creator/writer of Five Bedrooms, The Newsreader and Party Tricks

‘Beyond the Hero’s Journey is a wonderfully fresh approach to screenwriting and story craft. Anthony Mullins is masterful at marrying large ideas about creativity with a practical, down-to-earth approach to writing. His love of screenwriting, both film and television, is clear in the way he approaches the material, resulting in an enjoyable and thought-provoking read for all experience levels’ – Warren Clarke, co-creator/writer of The Heights

‘“The hero’s journey” is a story as old as time, and the template for analysing it feels even older. Time for a revamp! Enter Anthony Mullins. His thoughtful and contemporary take on crafting and critically examining story and character is a relief to read. If our common goal as makers is to refocus attention on history’s forgotten players and stories, then we have to change how we study them. Mullins provides us with new tools for excavating the psychology of characters who don’t exactly know what they want and don’t always change in a linear direction (or at all). It’s a joy to read and a necessary evolution in critical analysis’ – Meg O’Connell, co-creator/writer of Retrograde

‘Delightfully readable… Beyond the Hero’s Journey is a very enjoyable book, useful for experienced and emerging writers alike’ – GLAM Adelaide

To Krissy

Contents

Introduction

PART I

CHAPTER 1

PART II

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

PART III

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

PART IV

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

PART V

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

Conclusion: Shadows on the wall

List of films

Acknowledgements

About the Author

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this book was written – the Jagera, Turrbal and Lyluequonny (Pangherninghe) peoples – and recognise their continuing connection to land, water and community, as well as their long storytelling history. I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

Introduction

There’s a scene in the first season of the television series The Sopranos where Christopher Moltisanti, Tony Soprano’s nephew, is trying to write a screenplay loosely based on his life as a wise guy. He’s purchased a computer with a screenwriting programme that he thinks will do most of the work. But after weeks of labour, he only has nineteen pages and has hit a wall. He’s depressed, frustrated and, according to his friend Paulie, his apartment looks like a pigsty. Paulie asks what the problem is. Surrounded by empty beer cans and pizza boxes, Christopher looks up from his saggy couch and replies, ‘Where’s my arc, Paulie?’

Paulie has no idea what he’s talking about, so Christopher explains it to him. According to the screenwriting books he’s been reading, every character has an ‘arc’. In other words, they start out somewhere, something happens to them, and it changes their life. In his attempt to write about his adventures in the mob, Christopher has started to reflect on his own personal story. How does his story compare to the ones he’s watched in his favourite movies? How has his life changed? What’s his arc? In the end, he concludes that he doesn’t have one, that nothing good is ever going to happen to him, that nothing is going to change. Christopher’s problem is not simply creative. It’s existential.

It’s a classic scene from a classic television series that shows off what The Sopranos did so well. In a self-referential parody of the gangster genre, here is a tough wise guy driven to despair by the stories he feels he should be living out, based largely on the tough wise guys he’s watched in movies as a kid. It is both insightful and melancholic – and utterly hilarious – as it digs at the fears and anxieties that drive many of the characters in The Sopranos, including Tony Soprano himself.

It’s a scene that comments on how the stories we consume shape who we are and who we think we should be. Whether it’s traditional media like television, movies, novels and news articles, or digital platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or TikTok, when we consume stories, we are always comparing and reflecting. How do I relate to this story? How does it reflect my world, my beliefs, my hopes, my fears, my desires? How is it different? What does it tell me about the world and the lives that people lead? We look into the eyes of the characters and search for ourselves. It’s a deep human impulse. We need stories. Why? Because stories tell us we’re not alone in this big crazy world.

When we hear a story and connect with its characters and events and ideas, when we laugh and cry and think and feel, we are connecting emotionally with other human beings. Our first connection is with the writer of the story, who looked at the world and showed us a way to make sense of it through their craft. If the story takes the form of a movie, there is also the producer, director, actors, cinematographer, designer, composer and hundreds of other people who thought deeply about the story and made their own unique contribution to it. Then there is the audience who saw what you saw and experienced the same, similar or even different feelings.

But it goes beyond that. We also connect with the real-life people, places and communities that inspired the fictional story. We may not know what it’s like to actually live their life, but for a short time, while we experience their story, we have the chance to see through their eyes and empathise with their point of view, even if it’s very different to our own. It makes our world a little bigger.

It’s no wonder that human beings have felt compelled to seek out stories to make sense of the world around them. In Australia, where I live, the evidence of Indigenous storytelling stretches back 65,000 years, forming the oldest continuous living culture on earth. Stories are central to the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Thousands of years later, at a time when the world seems impossibly complex and unpredictable, it’s no coincidence that many of us have found comfort in bingeing on an endless stream of film and television stories. When we watch these stories, apart from being dazzled and entertained, we’re also thinking, ‘Wow, someone out there totally gets me!’

For some of us – quite possibly you – the craving for story goes beyond watching a movie or television show or reading a book. We want to be the storyteller. Without giving away my age, my urge to tell stories started with the Star Wars figures I collected as a child and arranged into endless spin-off of the movies. In my version of the story, Boba Fett, the mysterious bounty hunter, was the hero of the story instead of the villain, and I teamed him up with Han Solo (my second-favourite character) to fight the evil Empire. I just liked the idea of these two outsiders taking on the bad guys, rather than that try-hard teacher’s pet Luke Skywalker.

After a brief pitstop in fine arts, I swapped my paintbrush for a video camera and completed a degree in screenwriting and directing. One of my first short films, Stop, a comedy about a man discovering a traffic light in the middle of the outback, was selected for Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The opportunities to be a full-time screenwriter/director in Australia weren’t as extensive as in the US or UK, but I persevered and eventually landed a gig with LOST (2004–2010). At the time, this was one of the biggest television shows in the world. My job was to write and direct two spin-off web series for the show – FIND815 and Dharma Wants You. The projects won numerous awards, including a Primetime Emmy Award for Best Interactive Television (2009).

From there I’ve built a varied screenwriting career across television, documentary, web series and interactive storytelling, and the awards – including a couple of BAFTAs and International Emmy Awards – kept coming.

Inevitably, I was asked to teach some classes on how to tell stories for the screen. ‘Easy,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just go back and teach the screenwriting books I read at the beginning of my career.’ These books explored a lot of interesting ideas about how to write a screenplay, but I knew which one I thought was the most important: the Hero’s Journey. Anyone who spends even a few minutes investigating how to write a screenplay will come across the Hero’s Journey. It’s that influential.

The concept has been around for a while, some say thousands of years, but it was popularised in screenwriting circles in 1992 with the publication of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters by Christopher Vogler. In the book, Vogler, an industry script consultant, introduced readers to a way of understanding stories and, more specifically, movies, using a technique called the ‘Hero’s Journey’. It’s a useful and accessible book, written with passion and intelligence. It’s also a bestselling screenwriting book, so it’s very popular and extremely well known. ‘Perfect,’ I thought, ‘What could go wrong?’ Before I go into what did go wrong, let me give you a quick overview of the Hero’s Journey.

In his book, Vogler argues that the shape of most modern stories is derived from ancient myths that all display a recurring narrative pattern. Vogler presents this pattern as twelve distinct stages. I won’t describe the twelve stages in detail, but in a nutshell, they go something like this:

1 A hero is called to leave their home and go on an adventure to solve a problem.

2 The hero isn’t interested and refuses to go.

3 Soon after, a wise mentor persuades them to reconsider.

4 Something big happens that forces the hero to do something to solve the problem.

5 The hero enters a ‘special world’ where they are tested by unfamiliar forces and meet strange new allies and enemies.

6 Encouraged by their progress, the hero thinks they are ready to solve the problem.

7 Throwing caution to the wind, the hero tries to face the problem.

8 The hero fails – badly.

9 The hero reflects on this disaster and discovers a new way forward.

10 The problem is approached again.

11 Using what they learnt from their failure, the hero tackles the problem and wins!

12 After solving the problem, the hero returns home and shares the wisdom they have learnt.

Put simply, it’s a story about a hero who is forced to do something unfamiliar, conquers their inner doubts and fears, and returns home a better, stronger, more resilient person. The hero is no longer the same person – they have emotionally changed – and their lives are better as a result. A story like this tells you that when you step into the unknown and face your fears things can work out for you. Essentially, it’s an optimistic story about emotional growth.

Sound familiar? Think of your favourite movie. If you’ve been raised on Hollywood films, there’s a good chance it reflects this exact plot. In his book, Vogler looks at films like Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, Rocky, Pretty Woman, Rain Man, The Full Monty, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and North by Northwest and argues that thousands of movies fit this formula.

He also adopted a well-known screenwriting technique called the ‘Three-Act Structure’ to strengthen his argument for the Hero’s Journey. Developed by Syd Field in his 1979 book Screenplay, the Three-Act Structure contends that all movies are told in three parts or acts, which means that they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Field also argued that each act was a very particular size, right down to the amount of space it would take up in a script.

Drawing on studies of ancient myths, Vogler gave these acts a unique name to describe their function – Departure, Initiation and Return. In other words, the hero departs home, stuff happens to them, then they return home. There is a compelling, commonsense quality to the formula. It’s simple. It’s accessible. And when Vogler combined the already-popular Three-Act Structure with the Hero’s Journey, it felt impossible to talk about screen stories in any other way.

For the last thirty years, almost every screenwriting book, blog, podcast or class has used terminology and techniques that either explicitly describe the Hero’s Journey and/or the Three-Act Structure, or use variations of it. In his screenwriting manual Save the Cat, Blake Snyder shares an approach that is a stripped-down version of the Three-Act Hero’s Journey. In The Anatomy of Story, John Truby describes a ‘22-Step’ approach that maps out the stages a story can go through – like a souped-up Three-Act Hero’s Journey. Linda Aronson uses the principles of the Three-Act Structure to explore modern non-linear storytelling in 21st-Century Screenwriting. In Creating Character Arcs, KM Weiland uses a Three-Act Structure to explore character arcs in a way that has some parallels with, but also significant differences to, the approach I describe in this book.

The Three-Act Structure and the Hero’s Journey, combined for the first time in Vogler’s book, have shaped the minds of writers for decades. Screenwriting has never been the same. Movies have never been the same. When Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos is wondering if things will change for him, if anything good will happen, if he has an arc, he is drawing heavily on the Hero’s Journey. When fictional television characters start articulating an obscure industry concept like this, you know it’s gone mainstream.

But the influence of the Hero’s Journey goes beyond just movies. Vogler’s work is an adaptation and simplification of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, a highly influential study of ancient myths published in 1949. Campbell claimed he’d found a recurring pattern in folktales from around the world, and they all featured a journey through unfamiliar lands where the hero discovers wisdom and wealth – again, an optimistic story about emotional growth. Campbell called it the ‘monomyth’, which literally means ‘the one story’. According to Campbell, its influence was ancient, stretching back through movies, novels, plays and campfire tales, all the way back to our myths.

In some ways, it could be argued that the Hero’s Journey is the origin story of Western Civilisation itself, a culture built around the worship of courageous individuals (invariably men) who step into the unknown (often other lands), conquer their fears (and sometimes Indigenous populations) and bring home new wisdom, riches and ideas. These heroes have included Columbus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong and even Jesus himself!

It’s little wonder Chris Moltisanti struggled to find his arc in The Sopranos. He was trying to insert himself into the collective weight of thousands of years of myth-making. Everyone’s story can sound lame when it’s measured by that standard. It’s hard to be a hero. It’s hard to have an arc! This was the nub of the problem I faced with my screenwriting class.

I walked my class through Vogler’s seemingly compelling theory and we looked at some classic movies to see how it all worked. If we were going to find it anywhere, it would be in the Hollywood films Vogler discussed. But while the approach worked for fairly conventional and mainstream films, there were a lot more that didn’t fit at all.

For starters, a tonne of classic Hollywood movies weren’t about ‘heroes’ in the traditional sense. Instead, these films were about tragic antiheroes – Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, Badlands, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, No Country for Old Men, The Ice Storm, Mystic River, There Will Be Blood and Mulholland Drive. These films do not end with a triumphant return home with wealth and wisdom. They’re serious downers. No matter how compelling or fascinating these characters and their stories are, it is hard to see how they are ‘heroic’ in the terms set out by the Hero’s Journey.

Not only that, many of the so-called heroes of these stories did not seem to have an arc, or at least not the one Chris Moltisanti was looking for. They didn’t psychologically transform or overcome some deep emotional flaw. Despite what the Hero’s Journey argued, many of these characters stay the same all the way through. Think about it. What is Chief Brody’s emotional arc in Jaws? Overcoming his fear of water? Surely his fear of man-eating sharks would top water any day. Maybe it’s his failure to stand up to the mayor, which results in more shark attacks, but Brody spends most of the film fighting the shark, not city hall. No, Brody succeeds because he’s cautious and he cares, qualities that were evident from the very first scene. Sure, he overcomes his fear of water, but it’s not the character transformation that the Hero’s Journey demands.

Let’s look at some more examples. What’s Indiana Jones’ arc in Raiders of the Lost Ark? His fear of snakes? That sounds a bit inconsequential, like Brody’s fear of water. You could argue that Indiana’s doggedly scientific worldview is challenged because he witnesses the power of the Ark, but it’s hardly a character transformation that shapes the whole story. Indiana succeeds because he’s consistently smart and resourceful, not because he finds religion. What about Ripley in Alien? From the very beginning she is cool, level-headed and absolutely right about the importance of following strict quarantine procedures!

So the Hero’s Journey wasn’t as universal or as useful in my screenwriting class as I’d anticipated. But what about the Three-Act Structure? Surely every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. This must work. But as soon as the class started to discuss where the acts started and ended in the story, no one could agree. In retrospect, I’m not surprised.

In Jaws, does the first act’s turning point occur when the young boy gets taken by the killer shark, or when his mother confronts Chief Brody, or when Quint the shark hunter turns up, or when Brody sets out in the boat to catch the shark? Go online and read a few ‘three-act’ breakdowns of this classic film and you’ll see there’s little agreement. There was so much conjecture in my class that the whole exercise felt counter-productive.

It seemed that pointing out that a story has three ‘acts’ – a beginning, middle and end – was like pointing out that a house has a floor, walls and a roof. While this was useful information it was also kind of obvious and didn’t really tell you much about exactly how the story/house was constructed (e.g., How many walls? In what configuration? What if I added a second floor? What if I wanted a shed?). Insisting on three acts in a story seemed simultaneously vague and overly prescriptive.

But there was a much bigger problem about the Three-Act Hero’s Journey that was nagging me: I didn’t use it in my own writing.

In fact, I didn’t know any professional screenwriter who routinely applied it in their screenwriting practice. I knew a lot of beginner screenwriters who tried to use it with varying success, but when it came to writers who made a living from their craft, they had moved on from the Hero’s Journey and figured out their own ways of tackling a story.

As we’ve seen with this small sample, the Three-Act Hero’s Journey is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of storytelling, despite what many of its followers will argue. Not every story is a tale of inner transformation and triumph. If a whole bunch of Hollywood classics don’t fit this model, then what would happen if you examined films from around the world that are not influenced by Western traditions of storytelling? Would the Hero’s Journey still be the universal monomyth Campbell claimed?

But there was a far more compelling reason why my colleagues and I didn’t use the Three-Act Hero’s Journey – we worked in television. Let me explain why this is significant. Firstly, the stories we watch on television are very long. They can span seasons, years and even decades. With this in mind, where does act one neatly transition into act two of Breaking Bad? Is it in the first episode? A third of the way through the first season? The end of the first season? Season 2? It’s very hard to pinpoint. That’s not to say screenwriters don’t use the term ‘acts’ when plotting a television series. We most certainly do. Usually we break an episode into four, five or six acts – not three. And guess what separates the acts? Commercials. The act breaks are not determined by a mythic story structure. They’re handed to us by television executives with a commercial imperative to make money.

Secondly, while television characters can be noble, transformative characters who experience an arc resembling the Hero’s Journey (Peggy Olson in Mad Men), they’re just as likely to be tragic antiheroes (Walter White in Breaking Bad), or characters who don’t change at all (Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, Don Draper in Mad Men). In fact, because television storytelling is so long, its characters spend far more time not changing rather than having some sort of dramatic emotional epiphany. Indeed, traditional television sitcoms implicitly promise that you can tune into any episode of a show and see the characters make the same dumb mistakes again and again and never learn a thing (‘Doh!’).

The twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey and the Three-Act Structure have a compelling commonsense beauty about them that, unfortunately, does not always stand up to the creative and commercial realities of screenwriting, particularly television writing. To his eternal credit, Vogler acknowledged as much in later editions of The Writer’s Journey where he discussed reactions from around the world to his ‘Hollywood’ ideas. Vogler noted that in other storytelling traditions, including Asia, Germany, Eastern Europe and even my own home of Australia, hero figures were often regarded with suspicion, and the idea of change, either emotional or social, was something to be sceptical of.

As you can imagine, that first screenwriting class I taught using the Three-Act Hero’s Journey didn’t go as expected, but we still got to watch a lot of terrific movies, so it was pretty great anyway. Afterwards, I found myself wondering how I wrote the screenplays I was making a living off. I felt certain I wasn’t leaning too heavily on the Three-Act Hero’s Journey, but other than that, I wasn’t sure. This is a common scenario for professional writers. There is so much internalised knowledge built up from watching and reading countless stories, not to mention writing hundreds of them, both successfully and disastrously. Professional writers know what helps them write the story they want to tell. They just don’t always know how to describe that knowledge.

What was clear was that my colleagues and I had similar instincts for what made a good story in the writer’s room. We all knew the ‘ah-ha’ moments when another writer’s suggestion fitted the story, and we knew how to build on it. We seemed to have a shared understanding of dramatic principles, even if we had different names for what we were doing. One writer’s ‘plot point’ was another’s ‘turning point’. Some will say ‘escalation’ while others talk about ‘complication’. So I started to wonder what those principles were and how they allowed us to break the conventions of the Three-Act Hero’s Journey and find our own voice as writers.

The result of that wondering is the book you’re reading now. It is drawn from my experience in writers’ rooms, sitting alone at the keyboard staring at a blank screen, writing on index cards, procrastinating, scribbling on whiteboards, drinking coffee, more procrastinating, long panicked phone calls with trusted colleagues and less panicked discussions with directors, actors, producers and investors as deadlines loomed. It’s also partly born of a doctorate I wrote about screenwriting and the creative process. I’m very proud of it, but it’s not required reading here. I wouldn’t do that to you!

At its core, this book comes from a desire to dramatically expand the range of stories that writers, and lovers of writing, can easily identify and describe beyond the confines of the traditional Three-Act Hero’s Journey. We’ll do this using one of the most powerful, and yet most misunderstood, tools in a writer’s toolkit – character arcs.

It’s a term you might have heard before, usually at the end of a long-running television show where the fans are not happy – ‘I can’t believe how they finished her arc!’ Character arcs map the shape of a character’s story – where do they start, what happens throughout the story, where do they end? Character arcs are widely and intuitively used by professional writers to not only give a cohesive shape to a story and its characters, but to also guide the narrative’s emotional tone and hint at its bigger ideas and themes. I like to think of character arcs as the ‘emotional shape’ of a story.

So why are character arcs the most misunderstood tool in a writer’s toolkit? Well, the Hero’s Journey is why. The Hero’s Journey is also a character arc (think about it – Hero=Character, Journey=Arc). But it is only one sort of arc – one where the hero emotionally changes and everything works out well.

Is this the only sort of story we can tell? Is this our collective ‘monomyth’, our ‘one story’? Of course not. But for all it’s talk of bravely venturing into unknown lands, the Hero’s Journey is stubbornly bunkered down in a very small corner of the storytelling landscape and, because of the incredibly narrow way it is defined, is incapable of exploring what else is out there. Perhaps the Hero’s Journey could do with a Hero’s Journey of its own?

Unfortunately, given the influence of the Hero’s Journey, many writers and writing teachers, as well as film executives and investors, have come to believe this is the only character arc there is, despite countless celebrated examples to the contrary.

This book is here to set the record straight.

We’ll explore the incredible power and versatility of character arcs using a very simple technique I call ‘Arc Analysis’. It pinpoints the key moments in a character’s emotional arc and how they combine to shape the overall narrative. This approach is designed to be simple and jargon-free. You’ll use commonsense words to describe the moving parts of the story, not mysterious terminologies.

We will look at a range of different movies to show how the character’s arc shapes the story without shoe-horning it into a pre-existing formula. The range of examples will concentrate on well-known and well-regarded Hollywood films, as well as acclaimed movies from around the world. There will be a few classics to set the scene, but mostly they will be contemporary films from a range of genres, filmmakers and backgrounds, covering laugh-out-loud comedies, triumphant human dramas, gut-wrenching tragedies, nihilist horrors and everything in between.

Some of the films discussed depict sexual assault, rape and violence as well as racism, homophobia and transphobia. As a result, I’ve included warnings before these sections to prompt readers who may find their subject matter challenging to read. I’ve included these films not only because they are excellent examples of the sorts of character arcs I want to explore, but because, in most cases, they handle the issues raised with appropriate nuance and sensitivity. Where they don’t, I take the time to discuss why that might be so.

There is no need to see the films beforehand, though it will help. If you’re interested in films and writing, chances are you’ve already seen many of them.

No list of movies will ever be comprehensive. Just look at the long list of inexplicable snubs during any Golden Globes or Academy Awards season. Nevertheless, the films offered up here are a genuine but incomplete attempt to widen the conversation about the range of stories we can tell as a community.

While I’ll be using a lot of movie examples, the techniques in this book can be easily applied to a television show, novel or play. Most importantly, they can be used to write your own story. Using the commonsense dramatic principles outlined in the following chapters, it is my hope that writers, both novice and professional, will discover what their story is, rather than be told by a prefabricated formula, and ultimately find their own unique storytelling voice.

When we imprison our stories in strict formulations – twelve steps, three acts, hero’s journeys – we shut ourselves off from authenticity and truth in storytelling. Whenever people talk about the ‘universality’ of the Hero’s Journey, the monomyth, the Three-Act Structure or the seven basic plots, it makes me think of Plato’s allegory of the cave.

In this story, a group of prisoners are raised from birth in a cave. They’re chained up in such a way that all they can see of the outside world are the shadows of people and animals cast on the cave wall. According to Plato, if this is all they can see, then the prisoners in the cave will believe that the shadows are what other people and animals actually look like. It’s a powerful idea that many films have explored, most notably The Matrix and The Truman Show. But this isn’t just a thought experiment – it has real-life implications for how we describe our world and the people in it.

In a popular 2009 TED talk, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about how the children’s books she read as a young child in Nigeria shaped how she saw the world. The books were all from the West, and their influence was so great that when she wrote her first stories at the age of seven, all her characters were white, had blue eyes and enjoyed doing things like playing in the snow and drinking ginger beer.

Despite living in Central Nigeria, where she and her friends were dark-skinned and the sun was always shining, Adichie’s world was shaped by the stories she had read. She was imprisoned in a type of Plato’s cave, watching mere shadows of the real world that was just outside her door.

Growing up in Australia, my own experience of this involved two simple yet powerful words that are central to the colonial history of this country – terra nullius. It’s a legal concept that meant ‘nobody’s land’, and it created a very specific story: that nobody owned Australia before the English arrived (despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people from a multitude of different clans, language groups and individual nations).

At school, terra nullius was the story we were told about Australia before colonisation. Despite being a brazen lie to justify the dispossession of Indigenous people, terra nullius remained in place until 1992, when Eddie Mabo, an Indigenous Elder, challenged the doctrine in the courts and won. It was then replaced with another popular ‘story’ – that Indigenous people did not resist colonisation or fight for their land. Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians are working hard to correct this myth too.

The world around us naturally sets limits on the range of our stories. Sometimes that’s a natural phenomenon, like an absence of snow, but mostly it’s cultural. Our culture, language and traditions help to define who we are as a community. Each is a prism through which we see and understand our world. This is vital and important. But it can also be limiting. As soon as a tradition attempts to describe who we are, it implies who we are not. It’s inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is assuming these traditions are fixed or universal. They are a selective interpretation of the world around us. Terra nullius was a convenient fiction for over two hundred years until it wasn’t. The Three-Act Hero’s Journey is not the whole story (and neither is this book!).

Using ‘tradition’ to set limits on the types of stories we are permitted to imagine, such as stories that only feature heroes who return home triumphant with wisdom and wealth, creates a cultural blind spot that denies most of us the chance to not only see ourselves on screen but to tell our own stories as well.

We’re not all heroes. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we screw up. Sometimes it’s tragic (The Godfather, Burning). Other times it’s comic (Inside Llewyn Davis). Occasionally we learn from our mistakes, but our problems linger (The Social Network, The Nightingale, Midsommar, Lost in Translation). Or we stick to our guns and overcome our problems by just being who we are (A Fantastic Woman, Erin Brockovich, Moana). Or maybe it overwhelms us despite our best efforts to stay strong (Sweet Country, The Father). Sometimes, our story is about a group of people, and no one is the hero (Shoplifters, Hidden Figures). And other times our story is just a small one, with no big conflict, no big lessons to learn (Paterson).

This book is about how to look for those other types of stories. The ones that aren’t always about heroes. The ones about the messier corners of life, where things are not so simple or always tied up in a bow. They can be poignant, compelling, truthful, riveting, terrifying, disturbing, authentic, inspiring, poetic, bewildering and flat-out entertaining. But best of all, they can help us see another side of ourselves too.

We live in a time when there is an expectation that everyone, for better or worse, can be the hero of their own story, curating their own Hero’s Journey multiple times a day, uploading their latest victory over everything that stands in the way of their desires. And when you step back and look, it can feel like our culture, at least in the West, has been heading towards this strange moment for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.

Like Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos, we’re all wondering what our arc is. And that can be hard. In a world shaped by ideas like the Hero’s Journey, failure, or even a modest victory, is not an option. The stories we’ve been telling ourselves have played a big part in getting us to this point. But our stories can lead us somewhere else too. In fact, they can set us free.

PART I

ARC ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 1

‘You know who had an arc? Noah’: Understanding story using character arcs

The foundations of this book are built on the concept of character arcs, one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s toolkit. Character arcs map the shape of a story and its characters, as well as guide its tone and hint at its themes. In essence, character arcs are the ‘emotional shape’ of the story – they map how the character feels at the beginning, in the middle sections, and the end, of a story. To help you grasp the usefulness of character arcs, I’ve developed an approach I call Arc Analysis. It’s a technique that draws together the key dramatic principles writers use to shape their story without resorting to predetermined formulas like the Three-Act Hero’s Journey.

Character: Inside and out

When writers talk about a character arc, they’re talking about change. Does the life of the character change? How much does it change? Where do they start and where do they end? More specifically, an arc is about emotional change. Does the character change at an emotional level? How much do they change?

To understand how a character’s life changes emotionally, we need to look inside them. Imagine your character in two parts – their external world and their internal world. Their external world includes physical things around them that make up who they are: where they live, relationships, friendships, family, job, wealth, culture, nationality and even the natural environment around them. The character’s internal world includes intangible things that make up the emotional life of the character: hopes, dreams, fears, desires, goals, beliefs, values, etc.

There is a natural interplay between the external and internal worlds of the character, but at the beginning of the story, these two sides are in a type of balance. That doesn’t mean things are perfect – the character might be in a crappy job, a tired relationship or even in the middle of a war zone – but their life is, by and large, not changing. Whatever their circumstances, the character is familiar with their life as they know it. Their external and internal worlds are running parallel, like a river flowing within its banks.

Generally, a story starts when something changes in the external world of the character. It can be a bad thing, like losing their job or a relationship breaking down, or even good things, like winning the lottery or falling in love. The external change creates new or unfamiliar circumstances for the character.

When change happens, whether it’s good or bad, it creates conflict between the character’s internal world (beliefs, dreams, fears, etc.) and their external world (family, friends, society, etc.). These two parts of the character head in different directions, like a river that has broken one of its banks, forcing them to adjust to new circumstances. The tension created by these unfamiliar circumstances creates conflict in the story. Conflict is very important. It is the river that a story floats on.

If there is no external change and the banks of the river never break, there is no conflict. If there is no conflict, there is little drama and even less story. The conflict can be extremely big (the annihilation of the universe in Avengers: Endgame), incredibly small (the search for poetry in everyday life in Paterson) or anything in between. It is the gap between the external world of the character and their internal world that creates conflict and generates story. The bigger the gap, the greater the conflict.

When an external change occurs, it creates conflict that puts emotional pressure on the character. How do they feel about the change? What will they do about the conflict it causes? Will they try to fix it or ignore it? No matter what happens, the character needs to make an internal choice. That choice is guided by their internal world and reveals a lot about who they are, what they care about, what they’re afraid of and what they want. It goes beyond the words a character says and exposes what they choose to do under pressure. It is a tangible expression of their intangible emotional life.

Character and choice

In Western storytelling traditions, the concept of choice goes to the very heart of both character and story. It’s what writers use to bring their creations to life, as the internal thoughts, beliefs, fears and desires of their characters take shape in the form of a tangible action, a choice about what they will do to shape the world around them.

Generally I’ll avoid quoting beardy wise old men throughout this book (e.g., ‘Such-and-such said blah-blah so it must be true’). But since we’re talking about Western storytelling traditions, and this guy articulated many of the ideas that shaped those traditions, it seems only right to get his thoughts. His name was Aristotle (he only had one name, like Prince) and this is what he said about characters in a story;

‘Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character.’ (From The Poetics)

Let me translate. Basically he’s saying character is choice. They are inseparable. Until a character actually makes a choice between one thing or the other, it is hard to know who they are on the inside. Do they choose to fight or back down? Do they listen to others or reject advice? Do they keep their word or betray trust? Do they tell the truth when they could lie?

An idea like this really gets to the very heart of character. This is because choice turns a character’s invisible emotional life into flesh and bone actions. It makes the intangible, tangible.

If conflict is the river a story floats on, then choice is the riverbank that tries to steer the direction of the flow. For example, as the story continues, more changes will occur, forcing the character to make more choices. Often, these will be small and only impact the events in a scene; other times, these internal choices will be big enough to alter the direction of the whole story.

Each major interplay of change and choice creates a natural act break in the story as things reset and the character faces new challenges. They’ve made a new choice, but will they act on it? Being able to recognise the most significant changes and choices in a story makes it easier to comprehend the broad structure of the narrative (see diagram below).

Types of characters

A character’s choices don’t just shape the story. They also tell us a lot about what sort of character this story is about. As mentioned earlier, a character’s choices are a tangible expression of their intangible emotional life. Thinking of choice in this way allows us to easily identify two fundamental types of characters: Change Characters and Constant Characters. A character is a Change Character if they resort to new or unfamiliar choices to deal with the conflict they’re facing. In other words, over the course of the story, the character’s internal world will transform as they take on new beliefs, values and desires and make brave new choices. It looks like this.

On the other hand, someone is a Constant Character if they draw on the same old choices they always make to deal with the conflict. That is, they approach the problem with the same internal beliefs, values and desires as usual. They do not change emotionally. It looks like this.

The character either emotionally changes or they remain emotionally constant. While that may sound a bit reductive, it’s worth pointing out that the traditional Hero’s Journey deals exclusively with Change Characters, so the palette here is significantly wider.

It is also worth noting that there are a lot of ways for a character to emotionally change or remain steadfast and constant. Depending on the story, remaining emotionally constant might be the secret superpower that will save the day, or maybe the ability to emotionally grow and change is what it’s all about. If it is, when does the character start to change? How dramatic is the change? Do things work out? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, or maybe it’s somewhere in between. It’s all about the shape of the story being told and the unique qualities of the character you’re dealing with.

Types of arcs

If the character’s future is looking positive and things have largely worked out at the end, they have experienced an Optimistic Arc. Their internal choices have pulled their external world back into balance. Below is an example of a Change Character with an Optimistic Arc.

Stories that feature an Optimistic Arc include Star Wars (A New Hope), Jurassic Park, The Farewell, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, Shawshank Redemption, Black Panther, Good Will Hunting, Moonlight, Booksmart, Tootsie, Dead Poet’s Society, The King’s Speech, Toy Story, Gravity, Sideways, Children of Men, The Invisible Man, Jojo Rabbit, Arrival, Being There, Her, Carol and, possibly, the entire catalogue of Pixar and Disney movies.

If, however, things are looking overwhelmingly negative for the character at the end of the story, then they have experienced a Pessimistic Arc. Their internal choices did not reduce the conflict and left it unresolved. Below is an example of a Constant Character with a Pessimistic Arc.

Stories that feature a Pessimistic Arc include The Departed, Black Swan, Burning, Under the Skin, Seven, Mystic River, Uncut Gems, Animal Kingdom, Sweet Country, The Father, It Comes at Night, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Mulholland Drive, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Talented Mr Ripley, Badlands, Hell or High Water, Citizen Kane, Macbeth (of course) and many more.

Finally, if the character’s outlook is both good and bad, then they have experienced an Ambivalent Arc. This is a really interesting arc where things are a bit more nuanced and complex, where internal change might be possible, but it doesn’t completely resolve the conflict. Stories like this often have a bittersweet ‘real-life’ quality to them. Overleaf is an example of a Change Character with an Ambivalent Arc.

Stories that feature an Ambivalent Arc include The Social Network, Shoplifters, Before Sunrise, The Favourite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Marriage Story, Thelma and Louise,