Story, Plot, Structure, and Drama

(Post originally published on the Octavio Guerra Royo's Website)

Anyone who makes the unfortunate decision on becoming a writer could find on the Internet and all over the media tons of talking and writing about plots, structures, characters, dialogs, etc. But there is an essential element in a narrative that any writer must master before anything else: it is drama.

The main goal of any work of art or entertainment (it is sometimes difficult to discern both things) is to convey emotions.

If you can’t make your readers or audience get thrilled, excited, moved, in other words, make them cry, laugh, scare or deeply attentive, your story simply has failed, it lacks drama.

On the earliest heroic poems, as Homer’s Iliad, emotions were everywhere: Achilles wrath, deepened by the death of Patroclus; the retreat of the Achaeans because of the Trojans attack; the battle between Achilles and Hector; the grief of King Priam, and many more motives for the ancient Greeks, as the gods’ involvement in the story, the “arete” moral issue, and the Trojan war subject, so relevant to their culture.

Drama is the main goal in a narrative. It is conflict, which is the backbone of a story, what unifies, fuels and moves it. Without it, the best plot and structure will fail.

Conflict is the base of any movement, change or evolution, from the very beginning of the Universe, with the apparition of protons and electrons, matter and anti-matter, natural selection, and so on.

Without a conflict, without drama, there is no narrative, it is only a static description of lifeless characters.

You can write the story of a perfect love, a couple of characters that deeply love each other. Both agree on everything and adores everything that the other do and say. They never have a discussion, an issue, a problem, anything. They live happily ever after.

Boring, huh.

I have just written 46 words and the story sucks.

The job of a writer is to grab the attention of its readers or audience, keeping and growing it into excitement until the end of the story.

A lot of stories fails getting the attention of their audience or readers because they lack drama, in other words, conflict.

Stories are made of relations between characters, but they need a fuel to set them in motion and grab the interest of the audience. That fuel is the conflict.

We need to set in motion our story, for example, one character discovers that the other is not what it is supposed to be.

Let’s set our perfect-loving couple story in the WWII London. She works for the British Defense Ministry.

Germans are bombing London every day and someone is giving the coordinates of the secret army locations to the enemy. Lots of military and civilian are dying because of this leak.

One day, while our heroine is taking care of her husband’s things, she discovers a hidden suitcase with a radio transmitter.

Is her husband giving the coordinates to the Germans? She is shocked and doesn’t know what to do. Should she report him to her superiors?

The conflict has jumped out from the top-hat and I have just grabbed your attention. Things suddenly change for the characters in our story. I have just written the introduction to our story, what some call the bite from the “Eejit’s Shark Theory.” **

This is the end of the first act in which we have exposed the normal life or the main characters (their unconflicted love) and the event which disturbs that normal life (the discovering of the suitcase with the transmitter by the heroin).

Now, our story is in danger of falling to the ground if she denounces her husband to the authorities and they detain him or he manages to escape to Germany or die in a confrontation with the British police.

Our story has lasted fifteen minutes. We need it to move forward and make it last at least seventy-five more minutes in order to have a movie class B.

We need to create a situation in which our characters can’t escape from their conflict. We also need to increase the dramatic intensity.

Drama tries to make each portion of portrayed life (real or fantastic) exciting and coherent, something that the actual reality mostly lacks.

Even those stories that seem absurd or senseless should be coherent with the mood or atmosphere of the story, and even the most absurd conflict should be solved in some way coherently before the end of the story.

Everything must make sense in a narrative or the reader or audience will shut down emotionally.

Let’s see: the husband arrives home and discovers his wife with the suitcase open. She is devastated. She argues with him, telling him that she has just denounced him.

He can’t let her uncover him, as he has just discovered the secret plans of the Normandy landing. He must get to Germany with this information (here we’ve just added a sense of urgency).

Stop right there! We’ve got a problem. He could kill her or leave her tied up while he escapes. Our story could fall apart.

We need something that keeps them together.

The conflict between the main characters is what determines the plot and the story development and structure.

Yes, she is a pilot, one of the few female pilots that serve as couriers between British military units (he has taken the info about the secret military units from her flying charts, he-he-he, that’s coherence!).

She could take him to the mainland behind the German lines. But, how could he compel her to do that? She is a loyal British subject and could easily die for the King. We and her husband need her to live.

A dramatic conflict is an opposition between the main characters of a story, the protagonists and its antagonist, in a way that neither of them can escape from their rivalry.

Hum… Okay… That’s it: she has a child from her first marriage. He takes both as prisoners threatening her with killing her child if she doesn’t take him to Germany.

We are in motion again.

The dramatic conflict should threaten the main character’s (the protagonist) existence in such way that it can’t escape to its opposition, and compelling it to change along the story.

Our first act had presented our main characters, their environment, their time and space situation, ending when this usual life breaks apart. The second act should describe the development of the conflict, which fuels the evolution of the protagonist (our heroine) from someone incapable or unwilling to face a conflict, into someone who is forced or get to be capable of the confrontation.

Our protagonist, who doesn’t know what to do in the first act, must do something to save her child life and prevent her husband from getting to Germany.

The second act, the main body of the story, should end in a final confrontation between the protagonist and its antagonist where the conflict is solved.

They could fight on the plane they have stolen to escape to Germany or she could trick him in a way he can’t kill her or her child.

The third act is the aftermath of the final confrontation, the protagonist could restore her normal life or begins a different one, for better or worse.

I don’t know how but our heroine manages to make prisoner her husband landing safely her plane back to England with her child. Here she is received as a heroine with pompous marching bands marrying a British lord admiral (when she becomes a widow after her husband's hanging as a traitor to the Crown) and living happily ever after. A disgustingly happy ending.

In a story, the conflict between the main characters, the drama, is everything, determining its plot and structure, and moreover, the success in appealing the readers’ and audience’s emotions.

So, if you make that fatal decision in your life of becoming a writer, you need to find the drama, this is, the conflict that your protagonist should face before thinking of writing any story, listing a plot or structuring anything in acts, chapters, scenes, or whatever.

NOTE:

** Read about the Eejit’s Shark Theory at https://www.octavioguerra.com/?p=353