Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

A Good Story has Undercurrents

A good story has undercurrents.

I am not referring to back story which is a different thing altogether. Back story is that huge universe of which a story is a mere speck. When I read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy I thought that was pretty broad and all encompassing. Then I read the Silmarillion which was his history of Elves Men and Dwarves and the Trilogy was only a two page footnote in that esistle. When we write a novel it’s like that… There is a huge back story of context and a little piece that focuses on the tale at hand. Even if the reader is not told everything the author has to be aware of that larger context in order to write convincingly…. However, this blog today is not about back story.

An undercurrent is a story beneath a story. For example in the screen play, Real Steel, there is a story about a fighter (Central Character...CC) who wants to win… to be a big shot… to be esteemed by women and have a heavyweight Robot Contender. So on the surface the audience gets to see a transition in character, a before, during and after snapshot of the CC and this constitutes the surface story.

However there is an undercurrent frothing below. The CC ran out on his wife and son to pursue selfish career aspirations and a dissipated lifestyle. At the end of what I would call the first scene in the movie he discovers his ex-wife has died and his sister in law is seeking custody of his son. This is fine with the CC who is more than willing to sign over the boy he sees as a complication he doesn't want to deal with. Concurrently however, after slipping to the lowest rungs of the Robot fight game, a county fair, he is distracted by a good looking woman in the stands and a bull in the ring destroys his Robot.

At the custody hearing he notices that his Sister-In-Law's new husband is a wealthy man and sees an opportunity to shake him down to get money to buy a replacement Robot. Now the audience is getting to see how low the CC has sunk and what a sleaze he has become. The Wealthy husband agrees to pay the CC the price he is asking but is about to embark on a honeymoon to Europe with his new bride and agrees to half down and half when they get back… and the stipulation that the boy spends the summer with his father.

So beneath this surface story an undercurrent begins to develop, of guilt, bonding and redemption. An undercurrent makes for a great story because the audience is getting two stories for the price of one. However, it is more than this... It is the delta between the two concurrent threads that begins to produce friction and heat

Undercurrents can take many forms. There are some things that are so painful for people to face that they use politically correct proxies as a substitute. They will argue about the food or the kids or the bills when the real problem rages beneath the surface…. Perhaps infidelity, or some other form of human weakness or issue that is too painful to confront.

An author shows the audience (reader), the surface or superficial thread, and then the subliminal thread and in the contrast of the two there is an incongruity that agonizes as the story moves along. It is a clash between façade and reality and it makes for great drama.

The reason this works so well in a stage play, (or any other form of literature), is because this is a game that is all to familiar to theater goers. A man plays golf and its “Business,” a woman goes shopping and it’s "Homemaking…" A man forgets a birthday and its because he no longer loves his wife, and a wife won’t make love because she has a headache.

People attach a twisted sort of logic to what they do and when their pat little politically correct “reasons” conflict with an underlying truth, the result is an undercurrent. “Oh the tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive (ourselves)”... and the consumers of literature, be they audiences or readers delight in the interplay between this truth and deciet that lurks beneath the surface of people's lives.

Writers who crank out words for a living understand this component, this ingredient in the a story telling model and work the hell out of it, yet to the consumer it is all but transparent... they know they like it but they can't figure out why. So when the "unwashed" decide they are going to try their hand at writing they usually begin with a remedial understanding of what constitutes the science of writing and if they include all the ingredients, and get the sequence right, it tends to be more by good fortune than design.