Getting Your Story Straight With Ken Atchity

Welcome to "Getting Your Story Straight" series on Instagram @storymerchant. This week's topic the 3 Act Structure

What is the difference between “Something that happens” and a “scene.”

Many submissions from both novelists and screenwriters are filled with “non-conflicted” writing, passages in which “something happens” that is filled with emotion, description, and symbolism in which no conflict happens to change the character(s) and forward the story, from a dramatic point of view.

In professional storytelling, drama is all that matters—not just in general, but in each and every scene.

The “scene” is the unit of drama. What makes a scene different from an event, or “something that happens,” is that in a scene a conflict is introduced and/or resolved. It’s that simple. A scene has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end; the beginning’s purpose is to “set up” the conflict, the middle works through the conflict’s components or obstacles, and the end “resolves” the conflict and/or, in some cases, introduces the next conflict.

In Memoriam Umberto Eco

I met Umberto Eco just once, but it was enough to impress me with the awe reserved only for the most serious storytellers I’ve come in touch with over the years, like Carlos Fuentes and Eugene Ionesco. By sheer serendipity, our offices were adjacent at the University of Bologna, when I was Fulbright professor there. Still, I was surprised to hear from him after my review of The Name of the Rose in The Los Angeles Times appeared. He called it, “the best review I’ve read,” and republished it in his Essays on the Name of the Rose (Bompiani, 1985). May he rest in honor.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Hardcourt Brace Jovanovich 

CONSOLED with the aphoristic acrobatics of Italo Calvino and the allegorical dramas of Dino Buzzati, 20th-century Italian literature had been awaiting the breakthrough Garcia-Marquez represented for Latin American literature. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose heralds the coming of age of the Italian novel, synthesizing the lyricism of Dante’s tradition with the intellectualism of Petrarch, the romanticism of Manzoni, the historicism of Morante and Moravia, with the introspection that Pirandello brought to the stage. And all this is cast in the suspenseful guise of a 14th-century detective tale.
Along the way Eco, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, provides a taste and view of the late Middle Ages, when all morality had been transubstantiated: “He seemed to me one of those crippled beggars of Touraine who, as the story goes, took flight at the approach of the miraculous corpse of Saint Martin, for they feared the saint would heal them and thus deprive them of their source of income, and the saint mercilessly saved them before they reached the border, punishing their wickedness by restoring them the use of their limbs.”
If you had a romantic notion of the relative simplicity of the late Middle Ages, reading this will complicate your view beyond (or at least up to the necessity of) belief. Fra Dolcino (Gherardo), a renegade Minorite, is one of the many villains, daring to preach love against an orthodoxy preferring the power derived from insisting on discipline—their instruments the rack and the collection box. Eco anachronistically transplants Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, showing us that figure’s historical roots.
In an abbey in northern Italy a secret council is held to react to the upstart Pope John XXII’s announcement that the just won’t enjoy Paradise until after the judgment, devastating the lucrative business and holy function of the saints—and its opening rituals are conducted more in the odor of politics than of sanctity.
For all but the highest clergy, this was a time when everything and anything was believed, a time when “for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.” Stories were exchanged about the “scipods, who run swiftly on their single leg and when they want to take shelter from the sun stretch out and hold up their great foot like an umbrella; astomats from Greece, who have no mouth but breathe through their nostrils and live only on air; bearded women of Armenia….the monster women of the Red Sea, twelve feet tall, with hair to the ankles, a cow’s tail at the base of the spine, and camel’s hoofs….”
Eco helps us keep perspective with a bawdy explosiveness of language reminiscent of Rabelais, narrative taking life in its own hands to serve the same purpose then as now. Brother Salvatore, describing cheese in batter, gives his recipe to Adso (the narrator):
“Facilis. You take the cheese before it is too antiquum, without too much salis, and cut in cubes or sicut you like. And postea you put a bit of butierro or lardo to rechauffer over the embers. And in it you put two pieces of cheese, and when it becomes tenero, zucharum et cinnamon supra positurum du bis. And immediately take to table, because it must be ate caldo caldo.” 
Eco shares Rabelais’ relative disinterest in character, preferring ideas and plot—revealing his affinities to the mystery genre he’s adopted for his masterpiece. What genre, after all, is more philosophical? As Adso and his master, William of Baskerville, unravel the perplex of bizarre ritualistic murders in the abbey and its labyrinthine library, we recognize (in addition to the obvious Watson-Holmes paradigm) G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers—employed to reconstruct the world according to Aquinas.
Those who know Dante will recognize other thefts: “A dark veil descended over my eyes, an acid alive rose in my mouth, I let out a cry and fell as a dead body falls.” The novel is a crossword in the hermetic tradition of Gongora and Borges, of Joyce and Quevedo, demonstrating a breadth of learning and depth of historical insight rare in our time when structuralists and neo-structuralists disingenuously pretend to have invented analysis. Eco’s own semiotics are rooted, he proves here, in the classics and the development of European culture.
He reminds us how mysticism has long been wed to Eros as he moves freely from the sublime to the carnal. Brother Adso’s illicit experience of forbidden love leads him to wax psalmodic: “As if no one longer existed, not feeling one’s identity at all, or feeling lowered, almost annihilated: if some mortal…could for a single moment and most rapidly enjoy what I have enjoyed, he would immediately look with a baleful eye at this perverse world, would be upset by the bane of daily life, would feel the weight of the body of death...”
William of Baskerville, Adso’s master, is the sleuth who uses his mind and his knowledge of optics and time-management to unravel the labyrinth. “A mad and arrogant Englishman” with a “great heart,” William is one who “laughed when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.” William defines himself:
“…It may be that, as imperial adviser, my friend Marsilius is better than I, but as inquisitor I am better. Even better than Bernard Gui, God forgive me. Because Bernard is interested, not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused. And I, on the contrary, find the most joyful delight in unraveling a nice, complicated knot. And it must almost be because, at a time when as philosopher I doubt the world has an order, I am consoled to discover, if not an order, at least a series of connections in small areas of the world’s affairs. Finally, there is probably another reason: in this story things greater and more important than the battle between John and Louis may be at stake…”
Opposed to him are those in the party of inquisition, who declare, “The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect first of all those who seem sincere to him.”
Adso recognizes William as an intellectual: “I had the impression that William was not at all interested in the truth, which is nothing but the adjustment between the thing and the intellect. On the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were possible.” He learns quickly his master’s runes: “And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don’t know why you know that you know what you do?
Eco dances on the banks of allegory without casting its inane waters. He examines the historical controversy over whether Christ possessed property in such a way that we recognize a problem today’s church has not yet resolved. Similarly, he presents the cynical rationalizations by which the Church justified her innocence of the Inquisition’s tortures and executions. 
William solves the murders only after Eco has had his chance to peruse the world in which both characters and author seek to define truth. William’s sole instruments are reason and perspective, as Adso hints in his question: “But how does it happen,” I said with admiration, “that you were able to solve the mystery of the library looking at it from the outside, and you were unable to solve it when you were inside?”
William replies: “Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”
Just as William’s logic reflects life itself, Eco’s book is a book of books. “Often books speak of other books,” William explains. “Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book or it is the other way around: it is the sweet fruit of a bitter stem….”
So we’re not surprised to find that the cause of the murders in the abbey is a famous book, the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, dealing with comedy. Eco brilliantly creates the Aristotelian text as William reconstructs it—in all likelihood as good as having the real thing, should the real thing happened to have existed:
“We will show how the ridiculousness of actions is born from the likening of the best to the worse and vice versa, from arousing surprise through deceit, from the impossible, from violation of the laws, of nature….”
William’s antagonist, Jorge of Burgos (a wonderful parody of Jorge Luis Borges, upon whose “Parable of the Palace” Eco’s own paradigm is constructed), succeeds in repressing and destroying Aristotle’s book because it threatened to undermine the structure of all holiness. Eco’s prologue honors the tradition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Rabelais’ preface to Gargantua, and of Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, in its confusion of text and reality, its expression of authorial uncertainty and responsibility to narrative itself. Eco even asks us to believe that “On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure neo-gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century.”
In Borges’ little fable, the poet’s word faithfully encapsulates the world, explodes it, and it its echoing replaces it. The conflagration at the end of The Name of the Rose is worthy in its epochal intensity of the conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude, with only one difference: the magic is here without the marvel.
When the labyrinth is unwoven our suspicions are confirmed: “The plan of the library reproduces the map of the world.” The final conflagration takes us, nostalgically but also with relief, from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance—which, escaping that alien world of ignorance and belief, reaches as far as today.

Kenneth J. Atchity

Write Your Novel to Be a Film by Kenneth Atchity

Novelists seeking representation complain that none of their books have been made into films. At any given moment, we have literally stacks of novels from New York publishers on our desks in Los Angeles. Going through them to find the ones that might make motion pictures or television movies, we — and other producers, managers, and agents — are constantly running into the same problems:

    “There’s no third act... It just trickles out.”

    “There are way too many characters and it’s not clear till page 200 who the protagonist is.”

    “I can’t relate to anyone in the book.”

    “At the end, the antagonist lays out the entire plot to the protagonist.”

    “There’s not enough action.”

    “There’s nothing new here. This concept has been used to death.”

    “We don’t know who to root for.”

    “The whole thing is overly contrived.”

    “There’s no dialogue, so we don’t know what the character sounds like.”

    “There’s no high concept here. How do we pitch this?”

    “There’s no real pacing.”

    “The protagonist is reactive instead of proactive.”

    “At the end of the day, I have no idea what this story is about.”

    “The main character is 80, and speaks only Latvian.”

    “It’s set in Papago...in the 1960s, and is filled with long passages in Uto-Aztecan.”

    “There are no set pieces.”

Of course anyone with the mind of a researcher can list a film or two that got made despite one of these objections. But for novelists who are frustrated at not getting their books made into films, that should be small consolation and is, practically speaking, a useless observation. Yes, you might get lucky and find a famous Bulgarian director, who’s fascinated with the angst of octogenarians, studied pacing with John Sales or Jim Jarmusch, and loves ambiguous endings.

But if you regard your career as a business instead of a quixotic crusade, you should be planning your novel from the outset to make it appealing to filmmakers.

Give us a strong (preferably male) lead who, good or bad, is eminently relatable — and who’s in the “star age range” of 35-50 (where at any given moment 20 male stars reside; a star being a name that can set up the film by his attachment to it).

Make sure a dramatist looking at your book will clearly see three well-defined acts: act one (the setup), act two (rhythmic development, rising and falling action), and act three (climax leading to conclusive ending).

Express your character’s personality in dialogue that distinguishes him, and makes him a role a star would die to play.

Have someone in the film industry read your synopsis before you commit to writing the novel.

Though I’ve observed the phenomena for several decades now, it still surprises me that even bestselling novelists, even the ones who complain that no one has made a film from their books yet, don’t write novels dramatic enough to lend themselves easily to mainstream film. It’s a well-known phenomenon in publishing that, with very few exceptions, the more books a novelist sells the less critical his publisher’s editors are of his work. So time and again we read novels that start out well, roar along to the halfway point, then peter off into the bogs of formless character development or action resolution.

A publisher invests between $25,000 and $100,000 or more in publishing your novel. A low-budget feature film from a major Hollywood studio today costs at least $40 million. There is, from a business point of view, no comparison. Risking $40 million means the critical factor is raised as high as can be imagined when your book hits the “story department” — much higher than the critical factor of even the finest publishers. Hollywood studies what audiences want by logging, in box office dollars, cents, and surveys, what they respond best to.

If you want to add film to your profit centers as a novelist, it would behoove you to study what makes films work. Disdaining Hollywood may be a fashionable defense for writers who haven’t gotten either rich or famous from it, but it’s not productive in furthering your cinematic career.

Happy 80th Birthday Oscar... you are missed

To celebrate what would have been his 80th birthday, Oscar’s family and friends generously shared some wonderful photos of Oscar and his extended musical family taken over the six decades of his career. 

These photos will be included in Dan Donaghy's upcoming blog on Oscar’s music, VivaOscar.com. 

Listen to Oscar's music on Spotify here

How to Frame Your Story for Hollywood Webinar

With Story Merchant's Ken Atchity and Alinka Rutkowska and Andrew Dupy of Leaders Press. Listen here

Chapter 2 “Dealing with your Type-C Creative Mind” – What’s Going on In There⁠

Whether they ask the question aloud or not, people always want to know what makes a writer's mind work. 

For all storytellers—novelists, screenwriters, journalists, nonfiction writers, and children’s book writers.⁠⁠ 

If you'd like more details or enroll in one on one coaching to perfect your story visit  The Writer's Lifeline 

Ken’s Weekly Book Recommendation⁠

This week "Writing Treatments to Sell" by Ken Atchity and Chi-Li Wong  ⁠

As Hollywood insiders know, the first step in selling your story idea for film or television is preparing a treatment, the brief pitch that sells the concept to a busy producer or agent.  ⁠

This manual is a step by step guide to writing the perfect treatment, and to using it to perfect your dramatic art and market your work to entertainment buyers and gatekeepers.⁠

Available on Amazon

FORBES: Filmmaker Nicole Conn On Promoting Her New Film And Caring For A Child With Special Needs During COVID-19

Acclaimed filmmaker Nicole Conn has dedicated her career to increasing lesbian visibility in film. With her cult classic, Claire of the Moon, and films like Elena Undone and A Perfect Ending, she has racked up dozens of awards and built quite a following.

Right now, Conn is currently navigating the virtual promotion of her newest film while simultaneously prioritizing the safety of her son, Nicholas, who has special needs. Nicholas was born extremely premature, and his severe chronic lung disease makes him enormously susceptible to COVID-19.

“He cannot be exposed to this,” says Conn. As such, Nicholas’ 24/7 nursing rotation has been reduced from the usual seven nurses to only two who see no other patients. “We’re on a tight protocol around him,” Conn says. “He cannot be around anyone but me, my daughter, and these nurses.”

Despite these challenges, Conn also continues to promote her new film honoring Nicholas. More Beautiful For Having Been Broken, released in April, is the story of a woman who escapes from her problems to a small town, where she bonds with Freddie, a boy with special needs, and his mother. Freddie has a rare disease called Fanconi Anemia and is based on Nicholas.

“The representation of kids with special needs, or even adults with special needs, is so grim in the industry,” Conn says. “I really wanted to share who my son is with people. Because I, like many other moms, sit in elevators where people are averting their eyes…Our children are so exceptional and wonderful. I don’t want them to be a secret anymore.”

Conn hopes the film communicates the beauty her son brings to her life.

“Nicholas has always completely blown me away with just who he is in the world,” Conn says. “I know it sounds beyond corny, but he has always been my greatest teacher. He’s got mindfulness down. You cannot be around him and not just sort of absorb his universe.”

More Beautiful For Having Been Broken, she says, should help viewers understand that they needn’t pity parents of kids with special needs. “I don’t want people to feel sorry for us. I want them to realize we have something really special in our lives. That’s what I really want the film to say. That, and don’t make our kids invisible.”

Conn is grateful that the film made its way through the festival circuit before lockdowns began, but now, she is also thankful to have time to connect with fans.

“By having all this extra time, I’ve been able to communicate with people from all over the world,” she says. “It’s been sort of a blessing.”

On May 8, there will even be an interactive livestream event that includes a viewing of the film as well as a live Q+A with the Conn and the cast.

Of course, More Beautiful For Having Been Broken also features a lesbian love story, but Conn is proud that sexuality is not at all a focal point. “Today we’re at a place in our filmography where we can basically not discuss lesbianism, but just show our lives,” Conn says. “I just feel like we’ve done the coming out story. We’ve really, really examined that.”

And yet, Conn says it is still far too difficult to find lesbian films. “It’s just excruciating,” she says. “Unless the movie is studio made, like Carol, it’s almost impossible.”

As such, in addition to working on another film of her own, Conn’s current focus is on Nicole Conn Films Global, an international group that will fund and promote lesbian filmmakers in all genres.

 “We just want our library to be full fledged,” she says. “There is more than enough room for all of us. Women think there is only room for one lesbian writer, one lesbian director, one lesbian show runner, and that’s just not the case.”

Conn is hopeful that she can help lesbian and other LGBTQ+ films become more mainstream. More Beautiful For Having Been Broken, in fact, was picked up for worldwide distribution through a partnership with Vision Films and Wolfe Video.

Conn hopes the film’s success will help bring more awareness to the need for special needs representation in film. So far, she says, its reception has been “pretty unanimously wonderful.”

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Molly Sprayregen

I am a freelance writer who specializes in LGBTQ issues

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