A Story vs. a Situation

Situations are parts of stories; they are not stories themselves.

What Is a Story?

In chapter two, I touched upon the phenomena of the terminology-language disconnect, and the fact that just because people use the same words doesn’t mean they are communicating. As you’ve seen, this is the case with the phrase “story premise.” It is also true with other words used broadly by screenwriters, novelists, playwrights, and just about anyone who writes creatively.

We now lay one more foundation stone to prepare for the “7-Step Premise Development Process.” This stone is made up of three pieces: story, character, and plot. Just as with the “story premise” phrase, when I ask groups of writers to define these three basic storytelling terms, I get as many definitions as there are people in the room. Ironically, everyone intuitively knows what a story is, but when asked they tend to give very generic and canned answers, like:

• A story is a narrative.
• A story is the sequential beats of what happens in a story.
• A story is your plot.
• A story is what your characters do.
• A story is a narration of events coming to some conclusion.

All of these (and there are many others) have some ring of truth to them, and for the most part they suffice when it comes to answering the question “What is a story?” But, none of these conventional definitions actually define the thing itself in a way that has meaning and significance for storytellers. As writers, we need to be able to go beyond dictionary definitions of critical terms d’art like story, character, and plot. We have to get under the surface and see how they are inextricably interconnected because only when we can see how each term builds one upon the other can we fully utilize any of them as tools for telling a story.

So, let me begin our below-the-surface exploration by giving you my definition of a story. It will seem simplistic and perhaps even canned at first glance. It is not. We will pull it apart to show just how intricate and complex the term “story” really is.

A story is the combination and interplay of character and plot that is a metaphor for a human experience leading to change.

There is a lot going on in this straightforward definition. The first thing to see is the phrase “combination and interplay.” This refers to a synergistic relationship. Synergy is best defined as an effect that is greater than the sum of the individual parts generating some outcome. For example, two individuals come together and fall in love, and the sum of their interaction results in a third thing that is more than either of them individually or together: they produce a relationship. The relationship is greater than the sum of its parts. And so it is with a story. A story is a synergistic effect of the interplay of character and plot. But, “character and plot” are fraught with their own troublesome definitions. What is a character? What is plot? We’ll dive into these hornet nests in a little bit, but the other thing to notice in this definition of a story is the last part of the sentence, “a metaphor for a human experience.”

Character and plot interplay and interact to create a metaphor. A metaphor is a representation or symbol of something else (usually something intangible). In this instance, that metaphor represents a human experience. Not an experience of a rock, not an experience of a city, not an experience of the Universal Consciousness, but the experience of a human being. As I said way back in chapter two, stories are about how we human beings teach ourselves about what it means to be human. Stories are about human experience—not some other experience.

The other part of this last part of the sentence is “leading to change.” I can hear the moans and sighs now, “What a cliché, why does every story have to have characters that change? Can’t people just be people? It’s so formulaic.” Here is the bottom line: if your story does not demonstrate your protagonist evolving into becoming more as a person, or de-evolving into becoming less as a person (the “growth” can actually be regressive), then what is the point of the story? What are you saying about the human condition if nothing is different at the end of the story than it was at the beginning? If you do this, then you probably do not have a story, you have the “something else” I’ve been alluding to in the earlier chapters. That something else is called a situation. Having a situation is perfectly fine, as long as you know that is what is happening, and you are consciously making this narrative choice. The problem is that most screenwriters think they have a story when they don’t; they have a situation. If you want a story, you must have some form of change in your protagonist, either in a positive or negative direction.

To summarize: if you have a story, then you are dealing with characters and plot that combine to create a human experience that conveys some meaning about the human condition, and all this results in some change in the emotional life of the character having that experience. The problematic issue facing us now is the problem of defining the two complicated terms “character” and “plot.” In order to fully understand what a story is, you must understand how character and plot interplay and combine.

The Magic Formula

(Character=Plot)=Story

The above formula makes no sense mathematically, but it makes perfect narrative sense. I call this the “magic formula” because there is magic in the telling. When you can understand the metaphorical representation that it captures, then a solid understanding of the meaning of story is sure to come.

The formula has the feel of an equation, and this is intentional. The natural tendency here would be to replace the first equal sign with a plus sign, indicating that character and plot are additive, and thus combine to create a story. But, that is not what happens. They are not additive, they are equivalent; not the same as in identical, but equivalent as in having equal weight or function. They are so interdependent that one cannot fully express itself without the other. Plot has no meaning (or is highly diminished) without character; character, if the character is three dimensional and real, must develop plot. Understand: we are not talking about a definition of story that is simply events strung together in some linear fashion with a beginning, middle, and end. We’re talking about a metaphor of a human experience revealing the human condition. This is a crucial distinction, unless you are writing a script or novel that is a situation and not a story. And so the magic formula is a visual expression of the fundamental and inseparable relationship that character and plot possess, making it possible for a story to be born.

What Is a Character?

Character is the combined effect of the personal motivation that generates a causal sequence of actions resulting in emotional change.

Character is the keystone of plot, and consequently of story. Every story is about a main character; we established this in chapter five as we unraveled the “Anatomy of a Premise Line.” In any story, characters are the ones who carry out the story’s action. You write scenes, set pieces (memorable and visual moments that define the story), and sequences where characters do their “bits of business” and have their dramatic and/or comedic interactions. Some of those actions can appear random, some causally generated by events, and still others are present because the writer thinks it would be fun to have a bank robbery at page fifty.

Your protagonist acts out specific actions in a scene because of their motivation, not because you the writer think it’s cool for them to do a specific action.

In the best stories, nothing is random or appears thrown into the dramatic mix because the writer always wanted to write a car chase scene to rival the one in Bullet. However, in the real world you the screenwriter will be asked to put things into your scripts that make no sense and have nothing to do with the story you want to tell. Welcome to the movie business. Be prepared for the “note” from creative executives, “Love your hero…edgy, a game-changer, sexy…but can we make him a robot?” This is an unavoidable hazard of script development both at the studio and independent production company levels. But what I am referring to is your story process before the script-by-committee meat grinder gets its hands on your work. While you are still the creative lead, you have to do the best job you can to make sure your central characters—especially your protagonist—act out of motivation, not out of whimsy or chance.

What does any good actor say to a director when they are not sure how to play a scene? “What is my motivation?” Until they understand what is motivating their character, the actor cannot know what actions will best illustrate that motivation. Without this, they will not be able to get the audience to buy into their performance and thus understand their character. It’s the same with writers. What a character does on the page (or the screen) is not random—it must be by design. Characters act in specific ways because of who they are as people, not because the writer thinks it’s cool. And who they are as people is defined by what is emotionally driving them to act. Joe the bank robber steals money because he can’t do anything else; it’s who he is as a person. The writer could have him do charity work at the local hospital, or have him decide to go back to college, or perhaps start a dog walking business, but how are any of those actions related to Joe’s motivation? Remember that in our premise line, Joe is entitled and self-centered. Taking other people’s stuff is consistent with his motivation, not pursuing self-improvement or charity work.

Every significant action taken by a character in a script is a window into who they are as a person. Character action is character development.

Given all of this, it should be clearer now what the first part of the character definition is referring to, i.e., the “combined effect of the personal motivation…” The next phrase to notice is “generates a causal sequence of actions.” This simply says that the motivated actions lead to causal events that make narrative sense. For example, Joe the bank robber decides he’s going to rob the bank. He then, as outlined in chapter four:

• contacts the old gang to act as the getaway crew,
• cases out the bank and studies the comings and goings of the staff,
• sets the plan to execute the heist,
• covers his tracks to make sure there is no incriminating evidence in his old apartment,
• the list could go on.

He does not do the following:

• contacts the old gang to act as the getaway crew,
• makes friends with the local drugstore owner…just because,
• sets the plan to execute the heist,
• goes to the movies because he’s bored,
• the list could go on.

Joe could have done all these things, if you as the writer can devise a way to make them feel causal and connected to Joe’s personality and motivation. There are no rules here (even the ones I’m apparently laying down); you get to do anything you want—if you can make it work dramatically. However, that is a very big “if.” Many writers think they are throwing in crazy and wild character scenes that open windows into their characters, but in reality all they are doing is creating “out of the blue” moments that leave audiences or readers scratching their heads. If Joe goes to the movies because he’s bored, right in the middle of planning a bank heist, then you have to establish this is part of his ritual whenever he does something bad. He goes to the movies to center himself and get into his game head. If you can do this, then it will work. The problem is writers don’t make the necessary behavioral connections so that these “crazy” add-on scenes end up making dramatic sense.

The last phrase to notice is the “resulting in emotional change.” This refers to the same issue as with the definition of a story. Stories are about a character on a journey of change. Obviously, that character has to change on the journey. Again, if they don’t, then what is the point?

What Is a Plot?

Plot is the causal sequence of scenes that constitute the “what” of what happens in a story that originates from, and is at service to, the motivations behind the choices made by a character.

You should now be seeing the tight integration that is inherent in these three terms story, character, and plot. This integration is made more concrete when we consider the definition of plot. The first phrase to notice is “the ‘what’ of what happens in a story that originates from, and is at service to, the motivations…” What happens in the story is what happens on the page. What happens on the page is what the characters do. What the characters do is dependent on their motivations, i.e., who they are as people. So, what characters do on the page constitutes the “what” of what happens in a story, and this essentially establishes that character and plot are—at the level of the scene—essentially the same thing. Writers often speak in terms of “I’m writing a character-driven plot” or “I’m writing an action plot.” There is no such thing as a character plot, or an action plot. There is only plot. And plot is what your characters do on the page.

I can hear the cries of consternation, “Are you saying, Jeff Lyons, that My Dinner With Andre is the same plot-wise as Die Hard?”—of course not. They are different in a million respects. Die Hard has a lot more “action,” but the action is consistent not with something called an “action plot,” but with a character who is a reluctant hero and is a kick-ass kind of guy. In My Dinner With Andre, a pure talking-heads, art-house movie, it would not be consistent with these two characters (Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory) to start a food fight and destroy the restaurant; any more than it would have been a nice character moment for Bruce Willis (Die Hard) to have a quiet discussion with Alan Rickman about method acting in Poland. What your characters do is the plot, and what they do must be dependent on who they are, what their moral component is, and what they want to achieve. All these elements are about character and they demand certain actions while denying others. The most plot-satisfying stories are those in which the character’s actions are consistent with their personhood, and the action that arises from who they are is entertaining.

What’s more, plot is not just actions carried out by characters. All action is preceded by human choice. There is nothing that we do as humans, no action we take, that is not first preceded by a choice. Think about that in your own life; even the most mundane of actions you take every day is driven by some choice (“I will go to the store,” “I want to brush my teeth now,” “I think I’ll sleep in”); thus, the last part of the plot definition says “…behind the choices made by a character.” The choices made by characters are likewise consistent with their motivations. It’s all interconnected and propelled by the emotional drives of the protagonist (or any other significant character). Character actions flow from motivation, actions lead to scene-level beats that build into scenes and sequences of scenes, and all along the way characters make choices to act or not act in accordance with the same emotional drives that sparked their journey to begin with. I will describe this flow of action-scenes and beat-choices in the next chapter on “The Moral Premise,” but here you can see the main point: at the essential level of the scene, character doesn’t just lead to or generate plot—character is plot.

What Is a Story Again?

One more time, perhaps read this with new eyes:

A story is the combination and interplay of character and plot that is a metaphor for a human experience.

Now if you reconsider the original definition of story, the generic or cookie-cutter quality of the wording proves to be anything but generic. The word choices are precise and exact, and demonstrate that a story is a complex dance between character development, scene-level action, and choices and decisions made by characters—all of it adding up to an experience that teaches us something about out humanity and what it means to be human.

But, what if you have no need or desire to teach the world about what it means to be human? What if you could care less about teaching anyone about anything; all you want to do is have a good time and write a fun movie? Who the heck cares what you think about the human condition anyway? In this case, you don’t have to write a story. You can write a situation. This is, in fact, the thing that most screenwriters write; they just don’t know it. Understanding the difference between a story and a situation is one of the most valuable tools you can develop as a screenwriter. But, before I discuss why this is such a critically important skill to have, let’s first look at what constitutes a situation.

What Is a Situation?

A situation is one of the most common narrative scenarios used in screenwriting and commercial fiction. This is the case because most writers are great at coming up with clever openings and high-concept story hooks, but have little or no facility at generating and sustaining a satisfying middle. How many times have you come up with a killer opening and ending, but then asked yourself, “Okay, now what do I do for the other eighty pages?” It’s the middle of your script that is the actual story, and the middle is all about character development, dramatic or comedic, and creating reveals into character personality, and relationships, relationships, relationships. Did I say it also was about relationships? It’s about relationships!

Situations are not about relationships, they are not about character development, and they are not about anything other than entertainment and engagement. As you will soon see, if you can accomplish being entertaining and engaging, then you pretty much have a winner on your hands. You don’t need a story to be a successful screenwriter or novelist—you need to be entertaining. But, if you have more ambitious goals as a writer and want to actually say something about life and love and being human, then you don’t want to write a situation, you want a story.

How do you know you have a situation and not a story? After all, stories can be engaging and entertaining too. There are five basic conditions that tell you if you have a situation and not a story:

The Five Components of a Situation

• A situation is a problem, puzzle, or predicament with an obvious and direct solution.
• A situation does not reveal character; it mainly tests a character’s problem-solving skills.
• A situation’s plot twists ratchet up the puzzle or mystery, but rarely open character windows.
• A situation begins and ends in the same emotional space.
• A situation has no, or a very weak, moral component.

A situation is all about the puzzle, mystery, or problem being solved. Look at any police procedural TV show, or mystery story (Agatha Christie, Murder She Wrote, etc.), or most monster movies—they are all about one question: how quickly and cleverly can the protagonist get out of the pickle they are in and solve the problem. Let’s take a classic (and my favorite) scenario: the twenty-something kids caught in a cabin in the woods with the monster/slasher killer/alien outside trying to get in to kill/slash/probe them. The only questions are how many kids are going to die/get probed, how bloody is it going to get, and who will survive? That’s it. Nobody is going to have a big revelatory moment where they realize they have to change their lives in order to be happy; there will be no moments where we get profound insights into the inner workings of the protagonist (assuming there is a main character); and any twists or plot complications will be all about ratcheting up the tension of the problem, not pushing characters to some behavioral edge where we see who they really are—and the only change in the emotional space will be one of moving from happy-go-lucky (opening) to terror (middle) to relief at surviving (end). In other words, the hero or heroine will end the adventure in the same emotional place inside himself or herself as they started.

The most important factor of all is that in a situation there is no (or a very weak) moral component. The protagonist is not grappling with some personal flaw that results in hurting other people (emotionally) and then healing that flaw over the course of the story to undo any wrongs committed. In most situations, if the protagonist is grappling with anything personal it is merely that they suffer from some personal demon like addiction or mental illness. Yes, these afflictions affect other people, but they are more of a personal nature than a social one. As you will learn in the next chapter, for a character’s moral component to be moral it must be about how others are affected more than how the character is affected. In that sense, addiction and emotional troubles are only symptoms for deeper problems, but most screenwriters who write situations rarely go under the surface of the psychological into the real driver motivating any negative behavior a character might be exhibiting. Alcoholism is one of the favorites, and one of the most boring and formulaic. I think we can all agree that if we have to watch one more detective hitting the bottle because his wife left him, or another depressed CIA agent numbing out the pain of his lonely existence with tequila shots (no salt, or lime), we will just have to go running screaming down the hall and jump out the nearest window.

So, does it sound like I don’t like situations? Does it sound like I’m advising you to not write a situation, because a story is better? If you think that is my advice, then you would be mistaken. I have no judgments about whether you write a story or a situation. In fact, just the opposite is true. My issue is: are you conscious about what you are doing? Do you know when you are writing one versus the other? I want you to be a conscious writer; one that can strategically make narrative choices based on creative objectives and goals, not one that stumbles in the dark, landing into a story or a situation and being clueless about which is which.

Consider Table 6.1; it gives you a little perspective on what I really think about writing situations instead of stories.

These are all situations masquerading as stories, and we should all be so lucky to write one of these kinds of movies. I say “masquerading” because if you asked most people who write screenplays, they would tell you these are all stories. They would think this because they don’t know what you know—i.e., the difference between a situation and a story. Now that you have this key insight, you can perhaps better appreciate how powerfully situations satisfy audiences and clean up at the box office. Writing a situation, however, brings with it some unseen traps and pitfalls.

Examples of Situations from Chart

Contagion (2011, Warner Bros.):

Scenario: Average infected folks, members of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control, and various scientists race to find a vaccine for a virulent outbreak of MEV-1. We follow multiple story lines as different individuals grapple with personal and scientific problems along the path to finally seeing the source of the disease and the origin of patient zero.

Structures Missing: No clear protagonist and no moral component. The story is purely driven by the outbreak and not by any single personal story. This is a race-against-time puzzle.

Analysis: The story is a classic cabin-in-the-woods setup. Instead of a cabin, however, we have a modern society being besieged by the monster, and the twenty-something kids are all adults and spread out geographically, but the state of affairs is the same: the monster (virus) is outside threatening to eat the kids, and the only questions are: how many are going to die, how bad is it going to get, and who gets out alive? It’s all about the virus, the stakes, and the horror of thinking this could really happen.

Gravity (2013, Warner Bros.):

Scenario: A rookie astronaut on her first space mission finds herself struggling to survive after a random space accident generates a cascade of catastrophic events, leading to her having to race against time to find a way safely back to Earth before her oxygen runs out.

Structures Missing: No moral component. The story is a generic disaster movie, driven strictly by the dangers posed by the space accident.

Analysis: This film is a visual feast, but a narrative snack. Despite all the personal sharing and intimate banter between the rookie (Sandra Bullock) and her seasoned partner (George Clooney), the actual adventure is not driven by any personal story. The Bullock character is depressed over the death of her child, and has some guilt about what role she may have had in not preventing that death, but this has no connection to anything driving the actual story and is never developed, nor is the relationship between her and the Clooney character (who actually dies, thus eliminating any chance to develop that line). Events drive the protagonist, not the other way around. This is typical of all disaster movies: the disaster creates all the drama and generates all the jeopardy, and the protagonist (and others) can only react passively, jumping through hoops, rather than acting proactively.

What Do I Do If I Have a Situation and Not a Story?

As I said earlier, if you write a situation you have two goals in mind: be entertaining and be engaging. You want to do these with a story as well, but the good news is that if you write a situation those two things are “all” you have to worry about. In other words, you don’t have to worry about all the story structure stuff that a story concerns itself with. The seven components of the Invisible Structure are not an issue. You will have a few of them in place, like a character (protagonist), desire (your hero/heroine will want to solve the problem), and some form of an opposition (the monster/killer/alien), but all the rest of it isn’t necessary. Why? Because you don’t have a story, you have a situation. Remember, stories have a structure; they must have a structure. If they don’t then they are not stories, they are something else. Now you know what the “something else” is.

If you have a situation, and you try to impose all the structural elements of the Invisible Structure onto the situation you will create an unnatural, forced, and artificial scenario. Audiences will feel that the “story” is not working, even though they may not have the technical language or skill set to be able to identify what is wrong. They will intuitively know the story is not working as a story. How can audiences know this intuitively? Because we have all been reading, and listening to, and watching stories all our lives. We have all been raised with good storytelling and bad storytelling. We are attuned to the natural structure of good stories because we’ve seen, read, heard many thousands of them. People aren’t stupid; audiences and readers know this stuff—they just don’t know that they know this stuff. So, when you try to impose structure elements on a situation that only belong to good stories, audiences will know it, sense it, feel it. If you have a situation, focus on writing fun characters, great dialogue, impressive set pieces, and create the most complex and intricate puzzle/mystery/problem you can think of. That’s a huge job, and that’s exactly what all those films in the chart above succeeded in doing to become smash successes.

If you have a story, on the other hand, you have to do all these same things, but you also have to worry about the Invisible Structure components. As the screenwriter, you have the burden of being engaging and entertaining, but you also have to tell the story that is consistent with the right, true, and natural structure of the story.

The difference is that now you know something that ninety-nine percent of screenwriters and novelists don’t know. You know how to tell what kind of story you are writing, and this knowledge can make an enormous difference in your ability to leverage any situation or story you decide to write because if you know what you’re doing, then you can properly focus all your other skills as a writer to hone and target that situation or story into its sharpest and clearest expression on the page. This is what separates a pro from an amateur: being a conscious writer. The other thing that separates a pro from an amateur is having an intimate understanding of the moral nature of any premise idea. If you are writing a story, then the moral component can make or break your script, and if you can master this single story structure principle, then you will have a foundational tool that will deepen and expand every story you tell.