Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

A Life Changing Event

A life Changing Event

A good story begins at the “Good Part.” I've mentioned this several times before but now it's become a lesson objective. It's the theme of Lesson 2 in the Exploratory Writing Workshop. It's a major component of the prompt that will debut next week.

The basis for the notion is that for the most part a person's life is rather uneventful. We get up in the morning, go through the bathroom routine, go to work, come home, eat and go to bed.

Still one rare occasions we face a Life Changing Event. It's in one of these where all good stories begin. Something happens to jerk the CC out of their rut and set them on a new course. When this happens the CC must step back and assess what's going on. How will this event effect what their Wants Needs and Desires and what has been happening up to this point? Are there life style habits that have to change, are there some character traits that must undergo modification? Added to this is the certainty that there will be fresh obstacles to overcome and our past behaviors must adjust to some new changes in circumstances.

What this means to the writer is that in the time line of his/her story this event must be introduced early on, yet not before we get a look at the CC and what makes this character tick, and the world of the story is where all this is happening. It will have to come early but perhaps not immediately. However, the writer should not defer it three chapters into the novel. The reader or audience will start fidgeting long before that happens. So in the timeline of the story this becomes a pivotal point in the CCs life... one that changes everything.

Often in the One Act Play class I see anything but this Life Changing Event…What I do see is a stream of conscious that ambles along that makes me yawn and say, “So What?“ If this is a story about mowing the lawn, or selling lemonade or a recollection of someone’s first date then this might make for an interesting vignette or flash fiction but it simply won't have the stamina for a longer and more serious piece of work. No, the reader or audience is looking for certain things to come up front and a life changing event is one of them.
And if the reader has some age and maturity they are going to know what that sort of event looks like, smells like, sounds like and feels like. They will have that something known as experience and though it hasn’t happened many times, it's something they remember at the visceral level. They will know if this Life Changing Event has a ring of authenticity.

In the screen play Real Steel the CC is moving along, fat dumb and happy, in his downward spiral of debauchery and is close to an all time low...analogous to a drunk waking up in an alley with a Hobo urinating on his head. At this juncture he gets word from a lawyer that his ex-wife has died and that her sister wants to adopt his son. “No problemooo” our hero exclaims and then one thing leads to another and he winds up with his son for the summer. This is the life changing event in the movie. This is going to create all kinds of turmoil in the world of the CC and everything that revolves around it or spins off is a foot note. Some exciting footnotes but footnotes none the less.

I use the example of this movie a lot... not because I think it’s necessarily Oscar quality material but because those who wrote the novel and screen-play knew the craft, inside and out. It’s chock full of vivid examples of how to go about writing a good story.