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SeraphicMayin
Jul '18

Hello!~

I've made two other forum threads so far: What Makes a Story3 and Fundamental Story Structure, and now I plan on expanding into the topics of Setting and how to cure Cliche scenes.

(>vO)/ Let's get right to it shall we?

[As before, the following is from my notes on Story by Robert McKee. If you'd like a resource on fundamentals of Story, how it works, what it is, how to make an effective visual story, this is the textbook for you!]

The Setting

The primary method for combating cliches is to have a commanding knowledge of the world of your story. If you don't know your setting, it will fall into cliche super fast.
Originality is found in having knowledge of and insight into your fictional world.

How do we define this world or Setting?

Setting has four dimensions to it:

  • Period is the Story's Place in Time.

  • Duration is the Story's Length through Time.

  • Location is the Story's Place in Space.

  • and Level of Conflict is the Story's Position on the Hierarchy of Human Struggle.

I'll expand on each of these four in future posts, but for now, these are the four checkboxes of things you ought to fundamentally know about your story.

Put into questions that you can answer:

  • In which time period does the Story exist? If this is a high fantasy story, what is the analogous time period?
  • From the beginning to the end of the story, how much time passes? Thrillers sometimes happen over the course of a night, Epics can happen over the course of years.
  • What are the story's physical locations?
  • Is the primary conflict of the story:
    • Internal (The Protagonist vs. their thoughts, emotions, body)?
    • Interpersonal (the Protagonist vs. Family, Friends, Lovers, people they know)?
    • Extrapersonal (the Protagonist vs. Individuals in Society/Strangers, Social Institutions, the Physical Environment)?

    [[Ideally the most three-dimensional stories have conflicts raging on two or more of these levels, but there ought to be one conflict that defines the story at the top of the hierarchy so be sure to identify what that is!]]

A story's setting needs to sharply define and confine its possibilities. That is to say, within any world, only certain events are possible or probable. And you get to define this.

Here's a principle to follow for Settings:

A story must obey its own internal laws of probability. The event choices of the writer, therefore, are limited to the possibilities and probabilities within the world they create.

So once you set up a world, you have to follow its rules! That really gives us a godlike power, doesn't it? It might be tempting to let yourself have a free-for-all. Hence, my note of caution:

Restriction is Necessary for Creativity:

Have you ever been told 'oh just draw/write whatever you want' and immediately freeze up because of the multitude of possible things to draw and write?

And then if someone gives you a list of random words that you have to incorporate into what you make, is it not easier to suddenly come up with a wealth of creative ideas?

Often complete freedom causes paralysis, while any sort of limitations and restrictions provide us with freedom.
I believe this happens because we do not live in a vacuum. Everything we are comes from everything we have experienced and learnt in life.
You cannot create something from everything (which is also nothing because there are no two sides to everything, it is singular and indivisible. And therefore, unusable).

Limitation is vital. The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world.

Now when I say small, I don't mean you can't have sweeping landscapes and shifting scenery that has locations all over the galaxy, no. I mean that you ought to have a commanding knowledge of all the "Stuff" that is relevant to your story.

Just as complete freedom limits Creativity, the irony of Setting is that the bigger it is, the less you know, and the more cliche your choices become.

So, from where do we generate the material needed to build our Setting and therefore story?

Three Places: Memory, Imagination, and Fact

  • Memory: Explore your past and relive memories to find pertinent emotions that you want to express in your story. It's not so much what happened as how it made you feel. If you know this you can craft a story that generates the same emotion.

  • Imagination: The fragments of your experiences and things you've learnt gets connected with Imagination. It's when you take disparate ideas and find ways they fit together that you generate ideas through Imagination.

  • Fact: This helps you find something to say. Stories can be about any topic; therefore whatever the literal content of your story is, you can research and learn more about so that you can speak of it with accuracy, even as you might bend, transform, and push it further than its basic facts.

Here's something I feel not a lot of people realize, and if they do realize they're not willing to work for it:

The Craft of Writing demands you create more material than you will use in the Story.

If a Story is a collection of selective scenes, then you need a sizable quantity of scenes in order to select quality moments that are true to the Characters and the World.

Creativity means creative choices of inclusion and exclusion. Both are important. Not every cool thing deserves to be in the story, no matter how much you like it.

On How to Cure Cliches

Sketch a list of 5, 10, 15 different versions of an idea of your scene. It doesn't have to be written in detail, just get the broad strokes for how a given scene could work. These are like gesture drawings, done quickly and just to get the gist of the form.

Do not trust so-called inspiration. Inspiration is your first idea, and very rarely is your first idea the best one.

True Inspiration comes from a deeper wellspring within you. So experiment with the idea, turn it upside down, inside out, backward, and then forward again.

By the time you're writing out ideas for your scenes, you should have some knowledge of your characters and world. If you know those two in reasonable depth, a dozen or so sketches of a scene shouldn't be hard to figure out, after all, there are only so many possible things the character will do and the setting will allow.

Once you have your plethora of ideas, ask:

  • Which scene is truest of to my characters?
  • Which scene is truest to their world?
  • And which scene has never been seen quite this way before?

If a scene fits these three, that should be the one written.

However, if you truly feel your first instinct is right, then make variations on that idea, while keeping its core.

If we're being honest, 90% of our work is less than our best. But the great thing is that there's no need to show the failed scenes. Make no mistake, every spectacular work of story made has had dozens if not a hundred or more scenes/ideas tossed away.

If we keep at it though, we'll end up with something uniquely ours that doesn't fall to cliche, even if it began as a cliche.

I hope this provides you with something useful! I'm still learning with this 'create more content than you'll use bit', cause it takes forever to do. But every time I've done it, it's rewarded me handsomely.

What do you think?
Do Limitations actually lead to greater Creativity?
How do you make cliches unique to your story?
Do you follow the laws of your own setting?

Regardless, I wish you the best in your endeavours!

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Saajing
Jul '18

Excellent advise, especially concerning self-resriction on creativity. Also, the inclusion of "Fact", even if it's the smallest inclusion, helps elevate a story (and necessary when concerning historical and other non-fiction settings. I'd argue, though, that for geners like SciFi and fantasy, "fact" can be excluded indefinitely [they can truly give creators a god complex, which makes creative restriction even more necessary here, I believe]).

In the beginning, you claimed if the creator does not know their setting, that they will fall into cliches. I think you explained the fundamentals of a setting beautifully, but you did not elaborate on how a creator will fall into these "cliches," not did you say what these cliches you refer to are.

I personally understand what you mean, but for other beginning storytellers, your concerns seem ambiguous (especially since cliches can be a bit subjective [and I don't know what you mean by_that_]). Since these are from your notes on a textbook, mind elaborating?

Kamikaze
Jul '18

Good advise here @SeraphicMayin! If I may get on a soap box for one moment though (and maybe elaborate a bit on what @Saajing is asking):

In the talks my team and I give at cons, we often harp on the differences between cliche and tropes.

A trope is a kind of storytelling shorthand for communicating something quickly and easily to your audience.
A cliche is simply a trope that's been overused.

Tropes are not a bad thing, in fact, knowing your tropes IMO is how you go about avoiding cliche's. By studying the tropes of your genre, setting and influences you're accessing a metaphorical idea of what I like to call "The Creators Cupboard."

Picture a cupboard. It's full of every kind of ingredient you'd ever need to make your creative story, or cake. These ingredients are the tools you'll used to create cake. In order to create a satisfying cake you need to know what ingredients to use and why. What structure base will you use? Do you want it to be light and fluffy or dense and rich? Will it have lots of frosting (aka spectacle) or will it have less frost and more cake (aka story).

The best way to make an effective and interesting "cake" is to know your ingredients inside and out, right? Well, TROPES are your ingredients.

Let's say you want to create crime noir. The best way to begin is by looking at how other crime noir are created. How do other creators go about it? What are the cliche's of the genre? By knowing your tropes you'll be able to find the cliche's, understand why they're cliche's, and find new and interesting ways to break old ideas and flip them into new perspectives.

So imma give any creator here full permission: Go to TVTropes.org and spend the next 3 weeks going down every rabbit hole that has anything to do with the story you want to tell. By knowing your ingredients you'll be that much more prepared to tell a great story in your own way without overusing cliche ideas. :slight_smile:

SeraphicMayin
Jul '18
SeraphicMayin

@Saajing Ah thank you!

While yes, Facts based on our reality could be excluded in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, once certain facts are established, the world has to obey those facts in its internal logic. That's where the creative restriction comes from and it's a lot harder to do in high fantasy when you get to build the world and thus have to learn to be somewhat strict with your established laws of physics essentially.

That's fair. I was a bit ambiguous. I'll be more than happy to elaborate.

To start, a definition of Cliche:

Cliches are a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought, OR a very predictable or unoriginal thing or person.

In the case of Settings and Story, Cliches are those overused and generic locations that you tend to see over and over in genres. Examples can be the old western saloon, meet-cutes in a bar, the rooftop in high school slice of life stories, etc.

This overlaps with Stereotypes, which are unspecific generalities about the human experience.

Essentially, if you don't know the unique aspects of your setting, you'll fall into using generic locations and other aspects of the story's given Period simply because you don't have enough information to work with. This is why we need to produce and brainstorm a lot more content than we'll ever use in a given story.

The same thing applies to the story's primary conflict.

If the setting is just the 'generic old wild west' then the conflict may end up being the big high noon shootout with two guys facing off in the deserted main street with a tumbleweed going by.

On the other hand, if the setting is a specific old west town that's in its hey-day that's based on an amalgamation of research and imagination to connect disparate ideas into the 'old west' aesthetic, then the unique aspects of the story's setting could still culminate in a shootout but not in the usual predictable manner as the iconic cowboy faceoff. [I'd use Westworld as an example; like the season 1 scene of the safe robbery at the brothel/bar. It still had all the high points of a western but a number of unexpected elements that made it unique to Westworld and not any other story.]

Cliches come in all forms and I don't mean to say that they can't work if it really suits the story. In general, I think a good rule of knowing if a thing is a cliche is to ask this;

Has this been done in exactly or pretty much this way somewhere else?

And then, if you still want to keep the spirit of that cliche, ask:

How can I do this differently yet still get the same feeling or result?
and
Will it be true to my story and characters?

And that's where you start to sketch out different scenes to rapidly get out as many ideas from your brain as you can.
=
@Kamikaze
Yes! Splendid~
Oh I do love my tropes <3 Yess. If you don't mind I'd like to add that Tropes can also be known as Conventions. Every type of story, in any genre, (Because there's nothing new under the sun), has conventions and they're inescapable. So it's best to embrace them.

And like @Kamikaze says, yeah you have to know your tropes and know your genre! The more you know the better you can use those ingredients~
Thanks so much for sharing this! You are wonderful~

LordSeriphus
Jul '18
1

Dude... This post made me happy. xD

I have so much of my world planned out, and I'm learning more and more about it from my current work. I have characters that appear for a few scenes that call upon them, but I know way more about them and their lives than what will ever be shown in my current story.

Just the other day I created a post wondering if I should jump into a story conflict, which I wanted to, so I did. Or if I should add a scene with my characters messing around in a museum. (Which people suggested I do, and it allowed the main character to explore his freedom more.)
This scene taught me even more about the world they were in, and it allowed me to learn more about the characters in later chapters.

The world we have is massive, and things we've created in the last seven years wind up connecting with things we've recently made, when we never even thought of their connection before.
Maybe this is why I couldn't finish novels when I was younger. I always felt the stories were hard to create within the world, because I didn't know enough about my own creation. But we have the world so flushed out and ready in our minds that we love creating new stories and characters in it these days! We're still constantly learning new things about it. But it's finally developed to a point where we actually know what we're doing and what the characters are able to do. ^.^

You post made me feel as though my current work is coming along exceptionally well. Even if that's my own opinion, it's extremely motivating! Thank you! ^.^

EDIT: Also, I wound up omitting scenes from the prologue. The prologue basically kicked off the entirety of my novel. At first I didn't want to omit the scenes, but I didn't like the flow they had, it went against the story in many ways. The mc explored too much about himself at too early a time, the other characters present would've only appeared in that short scene and really weren't important, etc. But I realized that omitting a scene in a novel doesn't mean it wasn't a life event for my characters. So in their lives it still happened, and I know that, but in the story, scenes can be omitted if they don't add to the reader's perspective and knowledge.