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.The major turning pointsTo define the boundaries between the main structural events, a full length story is most likely to have at least 1) and 3) of the following major turning points:Act l Turning Point.An event that propels the protagonist on his quest.This will orientate the audience, who will understand from this what will represent a successful – or failed – outcome to the story for the protagonist when we reach the end.Act ll Turning Point.Although not an inevitable, necessary structural plank like the other two, the dynamic of story often requires a turning point around the halfway mark if interest is not to flag.Usually, this is a serious blow to the progress of the protagonist and a setback against his achieving his quest.Act lll Turning Point.Act lll is characterised by a major turning point at which the protagonist enters into the final conflict with the forces of antagonism.The outcome of this ultimate battle will definitively tell us if the protagonist succeeded or failed in his quest.Key questionAnd of course, your inciting incident, perhaps coupled with the Act l turning point, must raise the correct key question in the mind of your audience.I won’t go through the principle again – you know this stuff – but we do need an inciting incident that raises a key question: The flag drops to start Wacky Races, the key question is.? Exactly.Who is going to win the race? The referee blows his whistle to kick off a football match.The key question is.? Who is going to win the match? A plane comes down in the mountains.The key question is.? Will the passengers and crew survive?Many people will look at their story and think, ‘that’s fine, but my story simply doesn’t lend itself to a big, clear key question.It just wouldn’t be right to try to force one in!’ And, of course, it mustn’t be forced.We have been talking throughout this book about what defines a down-the-middle, mainstream story, and I’ve used examples with obvious key questions in order to demonstrate the principle.But as I mentioned before, most stories that win the highest acclaim are off to one side of the mainstream, and the key question is not necessarily delivered on a plate with neon signs pointing at it.In the highest quality stories, the key question is usually part of the subtext – a knowledge gap divined by the audience through thinking about the events they have seen – so if you are writing a subtle story or one of high complexity and high literary merit, the key question might take time to evolve from the material delivered, and will grow over a period in the mind of the audience.But have no doubt: however subtle the key question and its method of delivery, in any good story it is likely to be there.Yes, there are exceptions.A Christmas Carol is a story without a clear key question, and yet it is an absolute classic.It has.Instead, half-a-dozen sequence event questions.It’s quite possible your story is an exception too, in which case I would find it hard to advise you without seeing your story.Contact me via the web and I’ll discuss it with you (I’m really very good, far too cheap and seem to get more attractive with every year that passes.).Seriously, stories without one overarching, clear key question, tend to have very definite character growth and/or comprise a number of smaller story events that do have key questions.If your key question is subtle or ethereal or deliberately unclear, I can’t help you to gauge if you have it right.I know what you are going through: endlessly worrying that you haven’t given the audience enough to ‘get it’, but on the other hand, you don’t want to ruin the beautiful subtlety by overstatement.The only clue I can give you is never to underestimate the intelligence of your audience.Remember the dining room scene discussed earlier? The audience is massively busy pulling apart everything you give them for clues as to where the story is going.You only have to sling them the seeds and they will envisage the trees for themselves.And secondly, you must trust your instincts.It is something that must feel right to you, and you will deliver it correctly more through instinct than by science.If you are a fairly inexperienced writer grappling with a subtle and complex novel plot, it might be worth practicing on a couple of more mainstream storylines, to develop your experience, as you grow the complex masterpiece into its ideal form in the background over the longer term.ForeshadowingIt often amazes me that we all know, long before we even take our seats in the cinema, the basic beats that a story is going to take.We see a poster showing our hero looking tense, with an extraordinary monster of doom looming behind her.Before the movie begins, we know that these two will go into conflict and, in the end, the good guy will overcome the monster, and good will win out over evil.We are right every time – and that is what we want! Even so, we are still interested to watch the journey.We want to know what will happen.Now, this dynamic is extremely important to writers.Here is what Willy Russell said to me:I deliberately tell the audience at the very beginning basically what will happen in the end.I know it sounds odd, but knowing where the beacon is that we are heading towards is not only vital to the writer in knowing where the plot is going to go, but it heightens the tension in every single scene, because the audience understand the implications far more when they know where we’re trying to get to than they do if I had kept it all secret and we’d had a revelation at the end.As it is, the emotion builds towards the inevitable with far more power than it otherwise would.The audience shouldn’t be asking: ‘where is this story taking me?’ it should be, ‘I know where the story is taking me – how on earth are we going to get there?’A fine example of this is, as ever, Back to the Future.In each of the plotlines, we are told what the plan is right up front.We then watch the characters try to fulfil those plans.Doc and Marty make a detailed plan to hit the bolt of lightning and send him back to 1985.Marty and George make a detailed plan for how George will ask Lorraine out on a date [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]