The Moral Premise
The moral basis of a story will make or break any story—every story needs a strong moral component.
What Does “Moral” Mean?
You now have in place five of the six foundation stones you need to understand the “7-Step Premise Development Process”: story premise, Invisible Structure, Visible Structure, story-character-plot, and premise line. The moral component is the sixth piece, and in many ways this stone is so fundamental that it could stand alone. If you only accomplished having a solid moral basis for your premise idea, then you would be light years ahead of most other scriptwriters. You could throw away everything else in this book (please don’t), if you successfully achieved a story with a protagonist who had a compelling and clearly defined moral component, and your story would work—it would simply fall into place. That is how commanding and influential this component is on the development of any story.
Screenwriting gurus, script doctors, creative writing teachers, and successful writers in film, TV, and prose fiction have all written about the moral aspect of storytelling. They all tell you, “You need a protagonist who is flawed,” or “Your characters have to be broken in some way,” or “Your hero/heroine has to be damaged goods.” The idea, of course, is that the more damaged the goods the more vulnerable and sympathetic they will be, and with something broken, there is something to fix. Even with characters who are evil to the core, such as Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs) or Michael Corleone (The Godfather Trilogy), their evil has an unconscious quality to it that makes them likable beasts—they are oblivious to their own madness and this gives them the patina of innocence.
Entire books have been written about the moral underpinnings of storytelling and the need to have a moral heart to your story expressed through theme or some moral argument sewn throughout your story. So the idea of a moral premise is nothing new, and for many it may be a tired and overplayed subject that has been adequately written about. I disagree, not so much because what has previously been written about the topic has been wanting or lacking of substance—quite the contrary. There is a lot of great writing and teaching available on the subject of moral storytelling. What is lacking is not the expression of the need to do it in stories—what is lacking is a clear demonstration of how to execute it on the page and in a piece of writing. Very few teachers and commentators articulate a clear strategy for creating characters with convincing and sustainable moral components. Mostly what you will get are the protagonists straight out of central casting: the self-pitying alcoholic lawyer crying in his beer because no one believes in him anymore; or the lonely, embittered hired assassin questioning the meaninglessness of life; or the neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, plucky comic relief who is really the sad-clown under all the affected happiness. Most writers never go below the surface of the familiar masks to get at the real motivations generating a character’s behaviors. The reason they don’t go deeper is that they don’t know how to do it, or if they do know, they don’t know how deep to go. This chapter will look at all the pieces you need to construct a powerful moral component, and then show you how to execute it (how deep to go) in your script to maximum effect. When you master this foundation stone, and then combine it with the other five foundation stones, every story you write will resonate with audience appeal, three-dimensional characters, and storylines that are unshakable.
“Moral” refers to the principles, behaviors, and conduct that define a person’s sense of right and wrong in themselves and in the world.
What Is a Moral Component?
The moral component of any story is not just a single quality or trait you strive to achieve in your script. The moral component is an amalgam of three core elements that work together to achieve the kind of storytelling that lifts any story from the mundane to the memorable. The three elements of any story’s moral component consists of the following:
- The moral blind spot
- The immoral effect
- The dynamic moral tension
Moral Blind Spot
The moral blind spot is literally that, a blind spot in the protagonist’s sense of right and wrong, not just within themselves, but in the world. The blind spot is a core belief that the protagonist holds that twists their moral compass in such a way as to poison all external relationships. This core belief is generated by a base fear about themselves, a fear to which they are blind but that nonetheless colors all their choices, decisions, attitudes, and actions—all of which results in the hurting of other people, not just themselves. The main character may have a superficial sense of their flaw, but is blind to their base fear and core belief, and is in denial about the negative impact they are having on others.
If you are starting to see how this is sounding a bit like the magic formula from the previous chapter, then you are catching on. According to the magic formula, characters act out of motivation, and their actions are consistent with those motivations. The moral blind spot is the fuel of character motivation, so any actions a character carries out must be consistent with those motivations. They take on a moral tone because the character’s choices, decisions, attitudes, and actions affect other people. It’s not just inner torment and angst directed against the self (though this could be going on as well). The moral blind spot is about how the protagonist is acting deficiently in the world, harming others, and all because they hold a false belief about the world, a belief that throws them into fear (equally false) and that then acts as the driver for all scene-level motivation.
Motivation is not about wanting something—motivation is the thing that makes the wanting exist at all. Characters have desire in order to find tangible objects that can feed the motivation driving their need to want whatever it is they want. Motivation sources from the inside out, not the outside in—it comes from the heart and soul of the character, and everything in the story is at service to this inner driver (remember the definition of plot!). The key to understanding is that this driver, while sourcing from the inside, is never purely interior to the character. It must find its physical expression outside the character in the form of scene-level action on the page. This idea is at the heart of the old motto and cliché, “Show; don’t tell.” The act of showing in a story is not just about making scenes visual, it is about externalizing in a tangible way, on the page, the internal driver that is wreaking havoc with the protagonist’s moral compass.
Immoral Effect
The immoral effect is the moral blind spot in action; it is how you “show” instead of “tell.” There is no point in having your protagonist suffer from a skewed moral compass unless that skew demonstrates itself in action at the scene level in the script. If your protagonist is hurting other people, then the audience needs to see it happen, not just intellectually know about the moral blind spot. To reiterate: your protagonist has a base fear (about self) that feeds a distorted belief about the world that, in turn, produces actions consistent with that fear and belief.
A good example of this is Joe the bank robber. Joe has a core fear that he is fatally broken and flawed and he’ll never uncover what’s wrong with him on his own (moral blind spot). So he develops a sense of entitlement (skewed belief): “The world owes me an answer to my problem. Somebody ‘out there’ has to fix me.” In a sense, Joe is waiting for the cavalry to come over the hill to rescue him, but in the meantime he develops a twisted perception and belief that he’s owed something because he is “the exception,” he’s the broken one. His core fear is that he is unfixable, his distorted belief is that this makes him entitled, and the immoral effect is that he forcibly takes what is owed him—and screw the consequences.
Consider the following examples from literature, theater, and film:
Sunset Boulevard (screenplay Billy Wilder, 1950)
Protagonist: Joe Gillis (William Holden)
Moral Blind Spot: Joe feels he has no real value.
Immoral Effect: Joe uses people for advancement, even as he demeans himself; he manipulates others to look good.
Blind Spot-Immoral Effect Connection: Because Joe’s lack of self-worth haunts him, he seeks out situations that remind him just how “less than” he really is, despite his hunger for achievement and the need to be admired. It is his ironic lack of value that drives his lust for being valued by others.
Amadeus (play Peter Shaffer, 1980; screenplay Peter Shaffer, 1984)
Protagonist: Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham)
Moral Blind Spot: Salieri feels he is lacking talent, real genius—he’s ordinary.
Immoral Effect: Salieri cannot tolerate anyone excelling at his expense, so he must destroy them.
Blind Spot-Immoral Effect Connection: Because Salieri is driven by a core fear that he is mediocre (i.e., ordinary), when faced with real genius in the form of Mozart he obsessively drives Mozart toward his own ideal of perfection—and Mozart’s doom.
Of Mice and Men (novel John Steinbeck, 1937; screenplay Horton Foot, 1992)
Protagonist: George Milton
Moral Blind Spot: George fears he will be obliterated by the world if he lets down his guard.
Immoral Effect: He must compulsively protect Lennie from the world, or else it may destroy him—Lennie being a metaphor for himself.
Blind Spot-Immoral Effect Connection: Even while he resents his role as protector, he so completely identifies with Lennie’s vulnerability to the world at large that he dooms both of them to a tragic end, when he is forced by his fear of the world to “protect” Lennie in the ultimate way: taking Lennie out of the world that threatens to destroy them both.
The Verdict (novel Barry Reed, 1980; screenplay David Mamet, 1982)
Protagonist: Frank Galvin
Moral Blind Spot: Frank is blind to the fact that he sees himself as valueless and not mattering.
Immoral Effect: He sees people as targets and easy prey for money; people don’t matter, they’re just a means to an end.
Blind Spot-Immoral Effect Connection: Frank takes advantage of people because they have no value to him, beyond what he can manipulate out of them, but he feels this about other people because he has no sense of worth about himself. He would not hurt other people if he found himself valuable; which is exactly what he does by the end of the story, reclaiming his own humanity.
Dynamic Moral Tension
While the moral blind spot is the driver that generates the immoral effect, the dynamic moral tension is the engine that keeps it all running. Throughout your script your protagonist will have to make choices—serious choices. He or she will not be choosing vanilla or chocolate, or pizza with or without pepperoni. No, the choices will be: do I cheat on my wife or not, do I kill this person or not, do I rob the bank or not, do I save myself or the baby on the train tracks? The choices are moral, in the context we have established with our definition of a moral premise. And the choices all stem from the other two elements of the moral component we have just covered, i.e., moral blind spot and immoral effect. Character choice does not exist in a vacuum, it is generated by the engine of the dynamic moral tension that is constantly testing, and prodding, and challenging your protagonist to change and grow or to disintegrate and spiral into a worse moral condition.
This is critical to understand, because the dynamic moral tension is what gives you a passive or active main character in your movie or novel. You want your hero or heroine to be active, not passive. What is the difference between the two? An active character is one that generates scene-level action based on the moral component. The active protagonist causes, directly or indirectly, everything that happens in your story. The passive protagonist is the main character that generates nothing, but who is constantly in reaction mode, responding to external events that force him-her to act. Passive main characters tend to be dull and boring, because they just get pushed around by events, rather than create the events of the story themselves.
The two loop diagrams (Figures 7.1 and 7.2) that follow illustrate these dynamics graphically.
The Passive Protagonist Loop
Figure 7.1 Passive Protagonist Loop
A passive protagonist faces a problem-mystery-predicament. They did not create the problem themselves; the problem finds them and they have to decide how to act. Their response to the problem is reactive, not proactive. The situation is leading them; they are not leading the situation. In fact, situations (and not stories) tend to have passive protagonists for this very reason. The situation drives the hero-heroine in situations, not the other way around. The passive protagonist is forced by events to make a reactive choice, which then leads to a reactive effect (their choice in action). The loop shows how this problem leads to choice, leads to effect, and keeps looping around back onto itself, thus generating a kind of engine that fuels the passive choice/decision making process of the main character. When the problem or mystery gets solved, the loop is interrupted and the situation is over. Situations tend to evolve into episodic storytelling, which can be distracting and off-putting to audiences (and readers). As suggested earlier, episodic writing is writing that is plagued by many narrative starts and stops, disconnected and standalone events, and mini-stories or situations within stories.
Sometimes, protagonists can appear to be the instigator of things, and so the events appear to be generated by them, but this is not the case. They simply do something stupid, or make a blunder “out of the blue” and then an ensuing cascade of events forces them to react. The blunder or stupid mistake does not source from their moral component (i.e., their character); it is just something they randomly do. Stories that portray the basically good and moral person caught up in the no-win scenario (All Is Lost, Gravity) follow this passive loop structure. These situations test the protagonist’s stamina, or will, or perseverance, testing them to see if they have the mettle to get through the crucible they’ve been thrust into by random chance or by just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Underdog stories follow this loop, unless they break out and make the story about why the protagonist is an underdog, examining the moral driver behind their passivity or underachievement (Straw Dogs, Falling Down), and this—not merely surviving the situation—is the real lesson to be learned.
The Active Protagonist Loop
Figure 7.2 Active Protagonist Loop
In stories with active protagonists, all action is generated from the main character’s moral component. When the hero-heroine is driven by that core fear (moral blind spot), and then acts consistently with the fear (immoral effect), then all events in the story are directly or indirectly sourced from character, not generated as random external events.
Let’s look at how this plays out with an example: Joe the bank robber. Joe robs the bank because of his sense of entitlement, i.e., “the world owes me, so I get to take what I want” (moral blind spot), and he commits a crime (immoral effect); he does not blunder into a bank randomly and then pick up the wrong bag (filled with money) and accidentally rob the bank. Joe is the unwitting architect of his fall from grace. He is now a bank robber and on the run (problem/consequence), and must now find the best way to escape and not lose everything. So Joe calls up the best fixer he knows and arranges for his whole team to be snuck out of the country (proactive choice), leading to the whole gang becoming international criminals and targets for global law enforcement—something the gang did not sign up for! Joe’s action creates a whole new complication: the gang becomes resentful and starts to conspire to maybe turn Joe in to save their own skins (proactive effect). Joe continues around the loop, making choices that lead to complications, that lead to effects that lead to new problems, and so on, until this loop is interrupted by Joe’s moment of personal change, i.e., the truth moment. Joe is the source of the loop’s action. Joe drives events; events don’t drive Joe.
Figure 7.3 Active Protagonist Loop, Bottom Right
Through the course of choices, actions, and effects, Joe realizes he isn’t owed anything by the gang (entitlement blind spot)—he, in fact, owes them. He owes them a chance to live normal lives and not go to jail because of him, so he does the right thing and sacrifices himself for the gang that has done so much for him (truth moment). This change then leads Joe down the right side of the bottom portion of the diagram: he turns himself in (new moral choice) and the gang escapes and their lives aren’t ruined (new moral effect) and the story is over.
Figure 7.4 Active Protagonist Loop, Bottom Left
If however, Joe doesn’t have a truth moment of growth, but decides that he must become even more self-centered in order to survive (a la Al Pacino in Scarface), then he follows the left side of the bottom portion of the diagram: he sacrifices not himself, but the gang (new immoral choice), takes all the money, and then lives a life on the run, never sleeping in the same place more than one night, trusting no one (new immoral effect). The story ends with him alone in a cheap motel, surrounded by piles of money he can’t spend, watching bad game shows in the dark and eating junk food—story over.
In the active protagonist loop, the protagonist has a blind spot in their moral outlook, a blind spot that leads them to generate a false belief about the world that in turn generates action that hurts other people (immoral effect). This hurtful action leads to a problem or consequence. The problem or consequence is not some random, external thing, forcing a reaction—no, quite the opposite—the problem only exists because of the moral component in action. This problem forces the protagonist to make a proactive choice/decision, leading to a proactive effect (they’ve created this mess, now they’d better do something about it). The loop portion of the diagram shows how this feeds back on itself, generating more choices and more effects that act as an engine to create and source scene-level conflict. It is only when the protagonist has their moment of growth (truth moment), at which point they discover what they are doing wrong morally and heal their base fear (moral blind spot), that they can then make new moral choice and take a new moral action, effectively ending the story. If they do not have a positive growth moment, then they disintegrate down the path of de-evolution and their moral crisis deepens, perhaps to the point of self-destruction (again, think of the Al Pacino character in Scarface).
Conflict in any story sources from the protagonist’s moral component, and this fuels the active protagonist loop, which drives the middle of any story—thus helping to avoid mushy middles and episodic writing.
As stated at the beginning of this chapter, the moral premise is so important that it can stand alone as the keystone supporting all story development and story structure components, regardless of the story system, guru, or writing method you may prefer. Without a moral component, you have a situation with a passive protagonist (even if they are shooting everything in sight), and you run the risk of episodic writing.
Summary
You now have all six of the foundation stones in place: story premise, Invisible Structure, Visible Structure, premise line, story-character-plot, and moral component. You have the basic understanding of the fundamental building blocks of story development needed to begin to develop your story idea. In chapter one, you wrote out your story premise, as best you could, and over the last seven chapters you have probably applied some of the new ideas you’ve learned to that idea. That’s fine, because in the next part of this book, you and I will work through the “7-Step Premise Development Process” using all of these six foundation stones. We will walk each of the seven steps, and along the way introduce new concepts and ideas, as well as new techniques and tools you can use going forward with any new idea you have for a story, regardless of genre.
Keep in mind that the premise development process is not a quickie, not a magic bullet, but rather a precision instrument that takes time, finesse, and patience to fully master. A proper and usable premise line for any story can take weeks or more to develop, and it may even change during the writing process, because the premise line supports the writing, and the writing supports the premise line. You will constantly go back and forth “testing” your idea as you write. I will guarantee you that when you get your final premise line completed, and then compare it to your original pass from chapter one, you will be shocked at how different the two appear side by side. If they are not different, then you have discovered something important about yourself as a storyteller: you have a talent for this and you do it naturally and easily. Congratulations, you are one of the lucky ones. Whether you are a natural or a mere mortal of a writer, part two of this book will bring all this theory into dynamic action as we work through the seven steps of the premise development process on your premise idea.