O tempora! O mores!

It's been a long wait -- decades, he's been talking about it; since the last century -- but finally Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is nearly here. I hadn't realized how much he's modelled the story on the Catiline conspiracy, which resonated with me because six or seven years ago, having had a TV project blow up because of circumstances beyond my (or anyone's) control, I was told by the network executive who commissioned it that she felt I owed her a show.

Unable to return to the original concept, the rights in which Jamie and I were in the process of recovering from a delinquent former business partner, I started developing a couple of alternatives, one of which was this:

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Civilization is fragile, and finding that out can be a terrifying thing. When you discover that the laws that kept you and your loved ones safe are being burned down in a firestorm of hatred and hardline politics. When lawgivers are denounced as saboteurs, when fanatics seize power and whip up the mob with ranting and lies. When decency and compromise have fled and you can see the cracks spreading through society all around you…

Welcome to Rome in the 1st century BC.

The life of Cicero, from the Catiline conspiracy onwards, is an amazing, dramatic, twist-filled story of trust and betrayal, alliances and vendettas, triumphs and scandals, optimism and civilized values versus self-interest and the threat of political violence.

Look at that. The story should be fresh as today’s news, but those togas and laurel wreaths and mannered period speeches can make everything seem very far-off. Irrelevant. Safe.

So what we’re going to do is set the whole story in modern dress with modern dialogue. The events are the same. The people are the same – only they look and sound like modern politicians in present-day settings.

It’s a way to bring it all home, uncomfortably so, to make us really feel the gut-wrenching danger and turmoil of those times. It’s a technique we’ve seen applied to Shakespeare (think of Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus) but in this case we’re applying it to an original script based on real events.

We’ll stick to real Roman history whenever possible. This is supposed to be a modern I Claudius meets The West Wing, not a vaguely Roman-themed fantasy. That said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and (just like in I Claudius) we’re taking historical events as the basis for our drama, but we don’t have to be dictated to by them.

Cicero’s life gives us a story spine to connect all the major events in the collapse of the republic, but Mark Cicero is not the sole character. This is an ensemble drama (again, The West Wing springs to mind) that can pick up other characters and include flashbacks to earlier events. We also have the option to show earlier events (in the Social War that established the dictator Sulla, for example) in diegetic form, as newsreel footage for example. (Roughly: events of Luke Sulla’s early dictatorship will appear to take place in the mid-1970s, Serge Catiline’s execution in the 1990s, etc, with the main storyline appearing to happen right now.)

That was the basic idea. I played around with an opening scene just to get a feel. We might never have used the scene in the finished script; writing it was just part of my process. I liked the idea of a bunch of Romans talking in a sauna to start off with, so they’re wearing towels and for all the audience could tell it might be actual Ancient Rome, and it’s only at the end of the scene when the peppy business-suited assistant looks in that we see it’s all styled like modern-day.

The project never happened -- this time for reasons unconnected with deranged business associates, but simply because the show the network wanted was adventure sci-fi in a Doctor Who-meets-MCU mold, like the one we'd written before. Nowadays, after the triumph of Succession and with the possible last days of the US republic on the horizon, maybe it would be possible to go back in and repitch it. But I'm inclined to let Mr Coppola tell his version instead. He's done a few pretty good movies in his time, after all.

Over the crump-holes and far away

Something a bit different this time. A movie producer friend asked me to help out with a story pitch. I’m sure he has other writers he can turn to, but I’m an old pal so I’m cheap. Well, free. The story he’s developing has to do with fantasy and war – maybe simply so he can say it’s “Game of Thrones meets 1917” – and because those are subjects that might also be of interest to readers of this blog, here’s what I told him.

The best place I can think of to start answering the question is with the five elements that Aristotle said every story consisted of. This is nothing to do with the thirty-six dramatic situations or the seven fundamental plots or any of that how-to-write malarkey. These five elements are the fundamental building blocks of any story: Plot, Character, Setting, Theme and Style.

A story outline should cover all of those for your story.

You say you’re developing a story where some soldiers in World War One look out of the trenches and see that on the other side of the mud and fog and barbed wire is a shining otherworld.

That's a setting (at least half of one, the real world part) and the beginning of a plot. Plot is the bit that really conveys the high concept. High concept movies are strong on plot, soft concept are strong on character. A compelling plot premise is what makes people buy a book (Sleepyhead: a serial strangler isn't actually trying to murder his victims, he's deliberately paralysing them for life) or go to a movie (Flightplan: a woman wakes up on a plane to find her child missing, but everyone else denies she ever had a child with her).

Theme is what gives the story depth and a through-line the audience connects to. If plot is the reason you pick up the book, theme is the reason you take it to your heart and recommend it to friends. Theme also guides you in developing the plot beyond its basic premise. McKee recommends exploring the Theme, the Negation of the Theme, and what he calls "the Negation of the Negation".

So if the theme is Love, you'd contrast that with Hate (the opposite of love), Indifference (the negation of love), and Hate masquerading as Love (the negation of the negation). Those are all valid explorations of the core theme, each digging deeper and giving a more visceral twist as you find the antithesis that most strongly contrasts with your theme.

In your story, perhaps the theme is fantasy itself. Fantasy can ennoble mankind and make our solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives worth living. I’m talking about fantasy in the broadest sense here – poetry, music, literature, art in general. Not goblins! In exploring that as your theme, you could contrast it with the negative side of fantasy: escapism. Escapism just says things are crap so let's pretend they're not real. The "Negation of the Negation" is when we take our bad experiences and impulses into the realm of imagination and end up sullying it with them. In your story that could be by the characters bringing disease and war into the pure otherworld they’ve found.

Now you can populate the story with characters. Who are these guys sheltering from an artillery barrage? Let's say you've got a door-to-door notepaper salesman, a communist automobile worker, a conscientious objector medic, and a chorister who got into the army by lying about his age. The story will take each of them on a journey that has some resonance. The notepaper salesman has made a living out of selling the raw material on which a million people write their dreams and hopes, for example. Sometimes the plot and the theme suggest characters, and those characters change your first idea of the plot, and so on.

That gives me some idea where you might take the plot. Say that the fantasy world is a utopia, but your protagonists find only children living there. Later it turns out these are all the millions of children who will remain unborn because their fathers were killed in the trenches. So they are literally the hopes and dreams of those men that live on despite the existence of suffering and death.

Obviously to "squeeze the lemon" you will then have to have one of the characters meet the son he is destined never to have. He refuses to go back and die in the trenches, but that causes his son in the fantasy world to grow sick.

However, I wouldn't expect the story outline to set in stone how the plot was going to develop. That's something most writers would want to allow to develop organically. The outline should set out the plot premise ("a man is chained to the wall and the hacksaw next to him isn't sharp enough to cut through the chain") and only needs to sketch out where you would then go with the plot.

Once you've sketched out the theme and direction of the plot, you start to see where the style might borrow from. In the case of this storyline, I'd look at the war poets, and also at the Utopians like H G Wells and what they wrote after WW1 about building a better world. Why not style the otherworld on that? (A bit like Priestley’s imagined post-WW2 utopia.) Those are ideals that are still around today and would give the reader or viewer something to connect to.

The synopsis should be a few pages outlining who the characters are, where they are, what happens to them, why and what is the style/tone. Some people like to begin with a guide like this one:

1. Once upon a time... 
2. And every day... 
3. Until one day... 
4. And because of this... 
5. And because of this... 
6. Until finally...
7. And ever since that day...

So:

1. Bill, Fred and Jim were in the trenches
2. And every day the guns pounded
3. Until one day the gas drove them out
4. And they ran into a magical utopia
5. And they brought war to the utopia
6. Until Bill saw that to save the purity of the place he'd have to go back and die in the war.
7. And over the years, as Fred and Jim grew old, they could still see that utopia just across the fields at dusk.

These are just f’rinstances, of course. The writer you hire will take it in another direction, hopefully much more interesting that what I’ve come up with in the space of a few minutes!

I'll just add one caveat. A good story outline is a nice thing to have. It really does help you make a sale to the studio, network, or publisher. But in striving for the very best story, you can get distracted. Like, you know that steak they sell in supermarkets? It's bright red-orange in colour but that isn't what the best steak looks like. The best steak is hung for a week or three until it goes dark brown. Supermarkets dye their meat orange because that's what people think fresh meat ought to look like. And in the same way, having a good story isn't the most important thing for reaching an audience. They only get to see the story once they’ve bought their tickets. To grab their attention in the first place you need a hook. Fantasy and the Great War both seem at first glance to be a very long way from our lives today. Yet you have to make people stop and think, “That’s a story about me.”

But we’re talking about your story, not mine. And all this is free advice. So I’ll leave it there.

Try harder, Trekkers

Looking back from a quarter century on, it's hard to believe I cared that much. I'd just seen Star Trek Generations and I decided to tell Rick Berman what was wrong with it. Audacious, you might think. Pompous, even. But I stand by what I said then. If they didn't want constructive criticism, they could have written a better script. If any reader of Mirabilis has a bone to pick with me about mistakes in the story, I'll listen.

And I was aiming to help. They wanted to write a story of tragic sacrifice, but all they'd done was describe a high-stakes gamble that didn't pan out. The climax wasn't "a far, far better thing"; it was just "oops!" The letter went on:

"Mr Zimmerman is right. Heroic figures like Kirk and Spock have so often been seen to take extreme life-threatening risks that the only way to have them die in a way that works in narrative terms is when they are faced with certain death. When Spock died in The Wrath of Khan he knew in advance that his action would be fatal. But that wasn't the case with Kirk's death. Scrambling about on the collapsing bridge is the kind of thing he's done hundreds of times before. He knew he was taking a risk, but at no point did we actually get to see him make that crucial decision to sacrifice himself. In real life you could say that this turned out to be the one time his luck ran out, but the rules of real life aren't after all the rules of fiction.

"In this sense I believe Kirk's death was wasted. Obviously it is time to move on with the Trek movies now, but when a character like Kirk has been built up to such a genuinely mythic level the way he leaves life should be on a par with the way he's lived it -- full of sound and fury, and signifying a very great deal.

"This touches on a secondary problem I think you could have with subsequent Trek movies. You have a large cast there, and the awkward subplot with Data showed that it is not so easy to give time to every character and still maintain the narrative momentum demanded by a feature film. People aren't going to come into the theatres every two years to see the latest developments in an outer-space soap, and the more cerebral and complex character-based issues for which the TV series is justly famous are too subtle to carry an action movie. The best Trek films haven't just been TV episodes on a bigger screen, but stories with a big canvas and big ideas to fit.

"Mumon said, 'Do not shoot another's bow, do not ride another's horse, do not criticize another's work.' My suggestions are meant as constructive ones and I hope they don't give the impression that the movie as a whole wasn't good. It's just that I think it could have been great."

I even went so far as to enclose a five-page treatment for a follow-on Trek movie, in which the bad guys were the Yu, a neotic offshoot of humanity in the far future. Earth is now known as Terra, feared throughout the galaxy as the nerve centre of a ruthless empire. I described our time-travelling heroes' first glimpse of what was once their homeworld:

"Terra is not the blue jewel that it was in their own time, but a sinister shadow against the heavens, mustard yellow with pollution and crisscrossed by myriad lights marking out vast continent-spanning metropolises. A grim testament to the Yu's implacable totalitarian society."

A year and a half later, Star Trek First Contact came out. This time I realized the futility of firing off a letter about the flaws in the story. It would have had to be a much longer letter anyway. But there was one bit in the movie that got my seal of approval... No blue jewel, this.

A journal of the play years

Here's the thing about write-ups. The point of a roleplaying game isn't to create a story. "But, but..." you may say, especially if you've bought into all that genre-flavoured, trope-carbonated Hollywood screenwriting fizz. And I do like stories. I read a lot of them. I even write a few. But the second life conjured up by a good RPG session goes way beyond any of that break-to-act-two nonsense.

I'll give you a really good example. Watch The Knick. The first eighteen episodes are tour-de-force writing, as superficially formless as daily life and yet driven by conflict, emotion and need. In the last two episodes the writers were forced by Cinemax's cancellation of the show to tie everything up with a bow -- not even a suture -- and that meant scraping the barrel of trope-driven, by-the-numbers storytelling. Suddenly characters were having arguments that the actors obviously couldn't bring themselves to believe. Previously complex characters stood revealed as dastardly villains. An interesting and rather touching romance turned out to hinge on an improbable master plan. Two of the hospital staff abruptly decided to turn into psychotic murderers and then got together. Where before we'd had great original drama, now we had the most disappointingly cliched melodrama.

That's the kind of cookie-cutter plotting that comes from treating the narrative as an artifice to grab the attention of bored audiences rather than, as they had done previously, allowing it to find its own shape from the many nuanced processes going on inside. The determination of incident driving the illustration of character.

So I'm wary of going into a game with the intention of doing write-ups because it can make the roleplaying self-conscious. Players start worrying about whether their character will come across well, get enough of a starring role, be perceived as having an interesting (ugh) arc. That said, when the write-up is done in character and comes with all the unreliability and partiality that implies, it can be fun. And as I get older it gets harder to remember what happened in the session two weeks ago, so write-ups are useful mnemonics.

Preparing for one of our Christmas specials, it occurred to me that, although my group don't often bother with write-ups, nevertheless we'd accumulated enough of them in twenty years to fill a book. So I put them all together and printed up a dozen copies to hand out to the players, with this introduction:

Getting around the table for an evening’s gaming is a highlight of the week, and lots of fun even when (as often) we’re simply larking about.

But when the magic starts to work, and we steep ourselves in the world, and the characters speak through us – then our imaginations join together and take flight. And that’s when we might say to non-gamers: we have seen things you people wouldn’t believe…

Stories matter to human beings. They entertain, but they do more than that. They are how we see the world. And in our games we’ve had the privilege of getting inside the story. The joy of creating it together with good friends. The wonder of experiencing things beyond the everyday.

This book collects some of the fugitive scraps of those marvellous moments together. Long may it continue.

ADDENDUM: The point here, of course, is "the joy of creating [a story] together with good friends". That's why roleplaying is such a unique experience -- like life, what matters is not the story that emerges, but the fact that you make it happen and you experience it with people you care about. But for those who are interested in my group's write-ups, you can find a lot of them just by excavating the deeper strata of this blog. For instance:

• Tekumel
• 1890s
• Paragon
• Redemption (Legend) parts 1, 2 and 3
• Jewelspider (Legend)

I could go on, but it's safe to say that's probably more than enough.

Forget about storytelling and your games will yield better stories

“Some writers try to envision the structure beforehand, and they shape the story to fit it, but this is so often a trap. You should not try to stuff your story into a preconceived structure… Structure should grow out of character.” -- Colum McCann

My friend had just paid several hundred dollars to spend a few days being taught the secret sauce of Hollywood scriptwriting by a self-proclaimed guru.

‘I’d pay to hear Kaufman or Mamet,’ I said. ‘But I reckon they’d start off by saying there is no magic formula.’

‘I knew you’d scoff. Here, I’ll prove it works. Give me one of your Knightmare novellas.’

He counted pages to the plot points, the mid-point, the break into two. ‘See? Fits the three-act story structure exactly.’

‘That’s not proof of your point, though -- quite the opposite. 'Cause I just wrote that book. I didn’t map out where I should put the inciting incidents and reveals and reversals. If you tell a story, sure, it may very well fit the structure - but that doesn’t mean that knowing the structure will help you tell better stories.’

Here’s an analogy you may have heard me use before. Toss a ball and it follows a parabola. But there is no rule in nature that fits the ball’s trajectory to the equation for a curve. The universe doesn’t do equations. Instead the parabola emerges because of the force of gravity making incremental changes to the ball’s velocity. Then we look at it, get our maths on, and say, "Ooh, a parabola."

So too with stories. The changes in velocity are the deep rules of human interaction. The three-act structure is just one curve that you might perceive from a specific set of interactions.

People are suckers for an easy fix. Hence snake oil, superstition, and Trump. And hence also role-playing game design, which has been tempted off into the shrubbery with the seductive promise of a formula for better stories. Things like this:

"Each player around the table gets to write one of the fifty-six Johari adjectives in one quadrant of your character’s Johari window. Pick your character's primary defining adjective from the façade quadrant. The player who gave you that adjective that now assigns your character a Goal, a Grudge and a Geis of her choice. Every time you evoke one of those, the player who assigned it to you takes over as GM to direct you in a scene with potential for a Character Development roll…"

My view on this kind of malarkey is that I turned up to play my character, not to author yours. More importantly, you’re going to get better stories – more interesting, more complex, more surprising, more emotionally affecting, and more transformative – by setting out simply to inhabit the characters rather than by sitting at arm’s length and pulling their strings.

I would never try to shoehorn an RPG session into story shapes when I’m running the game, much less when I'm playing. Let the game take the course it wants without self-consciously imposing story templates and from time to time it will really amaze you. OK, so it probably won’t end up with the tidy three-act form of a blockbuster movie. But what’s more compelling: watching a precision-crafted screenplay tie everything up with a bow, or experiencing life with its shifting, overlapping, unexpected patterns?

The other day I heard somebody talking about a ‘crafted narrative’ RPG system. ‘We enjoyed creating the characters more than playing the game!’ he said – as if that was a good thing. But it’s not, it’s a fail. If you enjoy creating characters, fine. Become a writer. Though, if you do, for pity’s sake don’t subject us to stories wrangled through a Hollywood paradigm. Writers soon learn that it’s more fruitful to let the characters drive the story organically than to try to corralling them with reductive mechanics like goal achievements and epiphany moments.

Human beings evolved to perceive in events the shape of a story, because then it becomes a lesson we can learn. The events themselves aren’t a story, they’re just a cascade of cause and effect. The universe doesn’t do stories any more than it does equations. The story is the parabolic curve mapped onto the events afterwards.

Likewise, the experiences you have while playing the game are the uncollapsed wave function, and all the more interesting for that. When players recount their adventures later, that’s when the storytelling happens. Each character will come away with a different story – for example in this write-up, which describes things from my character’s point of view. If you asked another of the players you’d hear a very different tale. You get it. You’ve seen Rashomon.

In short, you’ll get better stories if you don’t try to create ‘stories’. Because it really is the case that truth (or a simulated life) is stranger than fiction.