“We think of this book as our mental toolkit, a collection of essential instruments that extend our reach, improve our aim and efficiency and make our craft much easier.”
“And that’s our intention with this collection of tools for crafting stories, to resurrect and restore some of these time-worn implements so that you can use them in your work, and maybe even make music with them. Use them to make your stories dance and sing.”
“We hand off the tool kit and the discussion to you, to build on these approaches, to refine them and make them your own.”
“So we wish you well, hoping you will use these tools for the greater good and enjoyment of all.”
Christopher Vogler, Memo from the Story Department
These quotes, from the Introduction and the “Parting Shot” from Memo from the Story Department hammer home that what Vogler and McKenna think they are describing are tools. The analogy Vogler draws in his parting shot is to different kinds of saws and to finishing trowels used by his father when smoothing concrete. I want to question this idea. If I gave someone a hammer, nails and wood, they would have what they need to build something. That something could be almost anything. A hammer is a creative tool. If I give someone a house plan and say build something, they will (1) ask me for a hammer, some nails and wood, and (2) build a house, or an office block, or a hotel, or a block of flats. There may be infinite ways to build a house, but with Vogler’s “tool” it seems like it’s always going to look pretty much the same. A plan (an outline, a formula) seems to me to be a limiting object. Some of the tools in Memo fit into the category of “hammer” and some into the category “house plan.” The hammers I get excited about; the house plans leave me feeling weird.
The items in Memo I would describe as “house plans” are the:
- formula for (Joseph Campbell’s) “the Heroes Journey,” (Vogler)
- summary of Vladimir Propp’s structural analysis of the elements of Russian fairytales (Vogler)
- list of character traits written by Theophrastus (Vogler)
The items that are “hammers” are:
- Having a theme (Vogler)
- The “Want” list (McKenna)
- The big deal (Vogler)
- Polar opposites (McKenna)
- Reciprocal Action (McKenna)
- Synopsis and logline (McKenna)
- Environmental facts: date, location, social, religious, political and economic environments (McKenna)
- The idea of contrast in his list of “ideas taken from Vaudeville” (Vogler)
(I’ve included which of the two authors wrote the chapter because it shows that, to a significant degree, Vogler likes house plans, and McKenna likes hammers.)
Overall, there are more hammers than there are house plans, which is good. Dealing with the house plans first, however, I am left with a kind of dread. Why do I feel so much unease about them? They are no doubt useful. More than every other piece of writing software I looked at had some version of The Heroes Journey Structure built into it. I found Propp’s structural elements fun, if not particularly useful. They function as a kind of shortcut for having actually read a lot of books or seen a lot of films. It gave me a reminder of some story elements I tend not to use, like “complicity”: the moment in a fairytale when the hero is tricked, or unwittingly does the villain a favour. But they feel like colouring-in books. And like tools from teachers who think that teaching means turning everything into a colouring-in book, or for students who think writing should be like filling in a colouring-in book.
I’ll come back to the attitude to teaching and learning in a second, but first and foremost there has to be something wrong with the idea of the creative process being reduced to filling in a colouring-in book – or, to stick with the metaphor, following the house plans. (Vogler describes with a certain amount of awe and delight the computerised story-creating tool developed by university students using Propp’s elements, and if that doesn’t sound the alarm, then the alarm must have been going off for a while and we’ve just got used to the sound of it.)
Vogler has a good and useful concern with what the audience deserves from the experience of seeing or reading a story. Their time and energy deserve to be treated with respect. Writing as catharsis for the writer is fine in a diary, but once he or she commits to writing for an audience, the writer does, I think, have a responsibility to give the audience something of value. But this concern is diminished when it becomes “what the studios want.” (Or is it? I’m still uneasy, unsure.) The different colouring-in books have strong historical bases in various studies: Propp’s analysis of fairytales and Campbell’s analysis of mythology. And Vogler, and others, have extended this to include contemporary texts, from Shakespeare to Chinatown. So it’s a formula based on what has worked for millennia. What’s wrong with giving people what works?
Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it, but the thing that crawls out from under it, for me, is the attitude of the writer and how the text gets built. Is it done with love and passion, or by-the-numbers desire for something oddly other: money, prestige, acknowledgement, “success”. This doesn’t mean these stories will be bad, but they will never be great. They seem to be offering something of value to people who want to write, but have nothing they actually want to write about. And isn’t that close to being the heart of what writing is about and what it’s for?
“Writing a book is, as George Orwell said, like contracting a disease. I’ve come to the conclusion that I should only write a book when I cannot live with its absence, when I have a question burning in my mind that must be answered.”
“Crossing Over: From Advocacy to Narrative”
by Samantha Power, in Telling True Stories.
I think we’re also getting closer to a more honest idea about how writing actually works, too. Stuart Spencer, in the best book on writing I have ever read, The Playwright’s Guidebook, calls this question you want to answer, or the thing you want to write about, “the impulse.” The impulse is “that which is making us want to write this play in the first place.” It may be, like for Samantha Power, a burning question. For Spencer, it may also just be an incident that piques your curiosity enough for you to want to explore it. But in saying this, he still gives the impulse prime position in the creative process.“Your story, for example, is expendable. There are a million stories, you can always get another. Your characters may evolve as you work on them. You’ll mold them according to your needs, and if you find you don’t need some of them, they’ll get changed or cut. The dialogue, too, will be in a constant state of change. Setting? Nothing is easier to change. It’s a question of rewriting the stage directions. Title? Lots of good titles out there.
There is nothing about your play which is utterly unique or irreplaceable, except one thing: the impulse that makes you want to write it.
You must learn to believe that the impulse is crucial and you must learn to protect it.
(p.129)
This is the origin of writing in the mind of the writer. In what could easily be read as a direct response to Memo from the Story Department, Spencer writes about getting in touch with and protecting the impulse. I will give you what he says, but a simple summary could well be: “Stay away from floor plans.”
The tools you learned in Part One won’t do you any good in finding the impulse. They are used by your conscious mind to help shape your play once it is written or as you are in the process of writing it. Finding the impulse is a process of delving into your subconscious and discovering what’s there. One of the most common sources of writer’s block comes from the attempt to give form to something which is not yet ready to be given form, so put the tools away for the moment.
Also, you’ll need to forget about all the other intellectual constructs of playwriting. You are not going to perform any of the traditional business of preparing to write a play. For example, you aren’t going to think about how to begin telling the story at the proper moment. You aren’t going to have the various incidents planned out ahead of time. You won’t contemplate how the play ends. You won’t worry about what your theme is. You won’t have a biography of all your characters. You will not have an outline to follow. You will not develop characters. All these concepts are ways to give your play form, and by using them you run the risk of losing the impulse itself.
(p.130)
My only quibble is that it may be that the story is not entirely in your subconscious. It may be that the burning question, like the one that drove Samantha’s Power narrative non-fiction work about America’s involvement in various post-WWII genocides around the world, is out in the world. The act of “delving into” may be into a library or a report gained through freedom of information. But even then, I guess, the impulse has to be a response in you, the writer.
But Vogler looks for stories in formulas, in structural analysis and the reconfiguring of parts as if a story is simply made up of a set of interchangeable parts. It’s the story-as-bicycle model. Change a wheel here, remove a light, add a different seat: you’ve got a virtually new bike. The writer becomes a mechanic, and the story has no detectable heartbeat. A house plan is not a substitute for an impulse to write.
But tools are necessary. (Just later, after you’ve safe-guarded the tiny flame of your impulse into a decent fire of an idea.) Tools are necessary to give the thing form and make it work for an audience. The Playwright’s Guidebook is not all about “the amorphous, unshaped, difficult-to-define combination of thought and feeling that is making you want to write a play.” Like Memo, it is full of tools. So give me a hammer. With a hammer I can build something. If I have the idea, the flame burning in me to tell a particular story, I want great tools to help me craft that story, to construct that building to house it in. But even in the category of hammers, in Memo from the Story Department there’s a problematic desire to name and categorise and control things, as if the aim of the whole enterprise is to domesticate the act of writing. (Maybe it is. Maybe I just have a problem with that aim.) But at some point I also think the problem is with the idea of how teaching works and what teachers do, or should do.
In a book by Daniel Coyle called the Talent Code, he writes about what practice is. In a section called Learn to feel it he describes learning to feel what proper practice feels like, and to enjoy being in that zone of focused struggle, or development.
It’s the feeling of straining toward a target and falling just short, what Martha Graham, called ‘divine dissatisfaction.’ It’s the feeling Glenn Kurtz writes about in his book Practicing: ‘Each day, with every note, practicing is the same task, this essential human gesture – reaching out for an idea, for the grandeur of what you desire, and feeling it slip through your fingers.’ (p.92)
This involves a letting go of ego and a desire for real engagement with the task.
‘Most kids accelerate their practice fairly quickly,’ said Meadowmount [music school] director Owen Carman. ‘I think of it as a turn inward; they stop looking outside for solutions as they reach within. They come to terms with what works and what doesn’t. You can’t fake it, you can’t borrow, steal, or buy it. It’s an honest profession.’ (p.93)
He ends with the observation that good (eg. Japanese) teachers like their students to struggle; bad (eg. American) teachers like their students to experience lots of success (but not much learning). According to a 1995 study Japanese students spent an average 44% of class time struggling with underlying concepts; American students: less than 1%. “American teachers… worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliing along. But you don’t learn by gliding.” (Jim Stigler, quoted in The Talent Code, p.93)
This desire to preserve the ego of the student and of the teacher – to give everything a heading and make it simply a matter of filling in the blank spaces as if writing was as easy (or hard) as filling out a census form – is wrong. Although it may seem attractive and sell lots of books to wannabe writers if the cover says it’s everything you need to know or that it will make everything suddenly clear and simple, but it is fundamentally backwards. The teacher is meant to make the complexity apparent; a good teacher makes the little steps obvious and gives feedback on a student’s performance and progress, but in order to motivate me, but also to be honest to me and about the craft, don’t buff my ego: show me how hard this thing is. Show me subtleties I don’t quite understand; show me how to struggle, and leave me to it.
Memo has a number of great hammers in it, really magnificent weapons of story construction, but the general tone of “it’s easy, anyone can do it, let me dumb it down for you and then wish you good luck” subtly but dramatically changes the learning landscape.
In contrast, I’ll finish with the opening of The Playwright’s Handbook. It is remarkably similar, but somehow completely different.
The tools we’re about to discuss provide you with the means to begin writing your play. Even the expert use of these tools will not solve all your writing problems, but they can offer you a sense of craft. Then you can apply that craft to begin the infinitely more difficult job of actually saying what you’re trying to say. (p.21)
Spencer promises an infinitely more difficult job even after you’ve mastered all the tools he offers, and his book is written with that awareness in mind. That’s the kind of writing guide that inspires me to find the questions that burn to be answered, the stories that burn to be told, and to collect and master the tools in order to struggle to make something great – not for my ego or my bank balance or to impress anyone, and not just another carbon copy of some other story someone else has already told.
A carpenter's roofing hammer: wooden handle, as heavy as you can manage.