Sunday, July 27, 2003
Lesson 18: The Smoking Fishbowl
It’s a cliché of storytelling that if you put a gun in your story in the first act, it had darned well better go off by your third act. Writer Stephen King joked that whenever he got lost in a story HE was writing, he just have one of his characters pull out a gun and make something happen.
But let’s say you’re not writing a story or a script that is, well, gun-friendly. Take the movie DARLING, directed by the late John Schlesinger, written by Frederick Raphael. DARLING, set smack in the middle of the swinging 60s in London, is the story of a narcissistic, but utterly compelling, fashion model, played by the luminous Julie Christie. Christie is a woman on the make, full of conflicting appetites. She wants to be a star, but she also wants a boyfriend who will spoil her and show her the good life. She wants to be a good person—but she also wants what she wants when she wants it.
And throughout her journey, which spirals up and down, through various places and people, she carries with her a fishbowl full of fish. She doesn’t name the fish, or even really refer much to them—but the bowl is much in evidence. When Christie moves in with t.v. personality Dirk Bogarde, the fish in the fishbowl represent their uneasy domesticity. Later on, when Christie is in thrall to the manipulative, perverse Laurence Harvey, they represent a kind of fragile normalcy. Finally, when they are gone (and you’ll have to rent the movie to find out how they go), they symbolize Christie’s rock bottom.
Writers often look for new characters and new settings to underscore the things they are trying to say, but sometimes you can find your answer at the bottom of a fishbowl. In a more sentimental movie, Christie’s character would have had a dog or a cat, but the writer knew that Christie’s flighty model wouldn’t have been home often enough to be a responsible pet owner. Nonetheless, the fishbowl planted in the first act has clearly exploded by the story’s end, along with Christie’s expectations about her life.
Do this with you own work: ask yourself what physical symbol in your story could work as well as DARLING’s fishbowl did? Ten extra points for people who don’t immediately decide to use a puppy.
It’s a cliché of storytelling that if you put a gun in your story in the first act, it had darned well better go off by your third act. Writer Stephen King joked that whenever he got lost in a story HE was writing, he just have one of his characters pull out a gun and make something happen.
But let’s say you’re not writing a story or a script that is, well, gun-friendly. Take the movie DARLING, directed by the late John Schlesinger, written by Frederick Raphael. DARLING, set smack in the middle of the swinging 60s in London, is the story of a narcissistic, but utterly compelling, fashion model, played by the luminous Julie Christie. Christie is a woman on the make, full of conflicting appetites. She wants to be a star, but she also wants a boyfriend who will spoil her and show her the good life. She wants to be a good person—but she also wants what she wants when she wants it.
And throughout her journey, which spirals up and down, through various places and people, she carries with her a fishbowl full of fish. She doesn’t name the fish, or even really refer much to them—but the bowl is much in evidence. When Christie moves in with t.v. personality Dirk Bogarde, the fish in the fishbowl represent their uneasy domesticity. Later on, when Christie is in thrall to the manipulative, perverse Laurence Harvey, they represent a kind of fragile normalcy. Finally, when they are gone (and you’ll have to rent the movie to find out how they go), they symbolize Christie’s rock bottom.
Writers often look for new characters and new settings to underscore the things they are trying to say, but sometimes you can find your answer at the bottom of a fishbowl. In a more sentimental movie, Christie’s character would have had a dog or a cat, but the writer knew that Christie’s flighty model wouldn’t have been home often enough to be a responsible pet owner. Nonetheless, the fishbowl planted in the first act has clearly exploded by the story’s end, along with Christie’s expectations about her life.
Do this with you own work: ask yourself what physical symbol in your story could work as well as DARLING’s fishbowl did? Ten extra points for people who don’t immediately decide to use a puppy.
