As far as I can remember, the first James Bond movie I ever saw was Never Say Never Again, which is not only not an "official" James Bond movie, but it was just dreadful enough to put anyone off the series completely. Bond is old, MI6 is a depressing relic of its former glory, and the movie manages to not only trample the luscious suavity of my since-become favorite Bond film (Thunderball) but manages to do so by being one of the first Bond films to turn up its nose at its own institution (Goldeneye was by far the most egregious violator, but that's neither here nor there).
At the end of the day, because it was a remake, because it showed a tiring and slowing Bond, and because it was not canon, Never Say Never Again became a sort of forgettable also-ran that no one need pay any mind. Even the comparatively slapstick Roger Moore era "official" bond films being produced at the time couldn't get NSNA a favorable review, and so freed of the burden of that ghastly film, I was myself free to go on to join the teeming legion of James Bond fans.
I love James Bond - not like the dude himself, that would be t3h gh3y - but the institution. He's a gentleman, a drinker, a lothario, a rake, a rogue, an erudite polymath and a cold-blooded killer. He's the sword of the empire, and to like Bond is to entertain a romance with order, hierarchy, and establishment.
To like bond requires a complicity, no matter how grudging, in the exploitation of the third world, of class structure, and of the most brutal elitism. While it also means a romance of tradition, culture, quality, and refinement, it is worth noting that all of these arguable virtues are exclusive in the extreme. To embrace Bond is to embrace what Leslie Marmon Silko calls the European Habit of Mind.
It also means that you're probably okay with pretty predictable three-act plot structures, which brings us to the point of this post.
Stories have three parts: A beginning, a middle, and an end; aka, the first, second, and third acts. In the beginning, you have a status quo which, by the end of act one, is disrupted by an inciting incident. All of act 2 is spent trying to figure out and confront that inciting incident (usually the first half of act 2 is spent asking questions, then at the midpoint the protagonist spends the second half preparing for action), which leads ultimately to a climax, dénouement, and a return to the status quo by the end of the third act.
Now you know how a story is written. There are about ten bazillion variations on this. In James Bond films, for example, almost all of Act 1 happens before the opening credits, e.g., in You Only Live Twice, we get about ten minutes of stolen space ship and James Bond being "killed," so that we can get onto his investigation into that stolen space ship. As another example, films by Wes Anderson seem to spend a great bulk of their length in the first act, allowing the action to slowly bubble up from inside so that the second and third acts overlap and resolve in anticlimax.
But the paradigm remains the same. Much like the "five paragraph essay" so hated by most new academics, the constant denigration of that form (that it's limiting, constricting, even fascist) can only speak in terms of what came before. Why three acts? Why not four? Who gives a shit? Go learn to write according to three act structure. What, you think you're too good for a three-act story? Think you've got some sort of revolutionary new writing technique that's going to turn the world on its ear?
Revolution needs context, and once an old order is overturned, the revolutionary becomes the status quo, in need of revolution itself. The western world has at large pretty much skipped this apparent cycle in favor of just selling books and stories that people actually want to read: stories with convincing characters and mappable plots.
The distinction most new writers fail to grasp is twofold: first, conventions are not meant to be binding, aka, the "screw you dad, you don't own me" complex. Conventions are meant to be supporting and stabilizing. Step one: learn three-act plot structure. Step two: deviate creatively.
The second facet of the distinction is that deviations from the structure themselves constitute a new structure. No, no, a thousand times no: you can create very deep characters by wallowing in the second act, you can explore process and growth by extending the second, and you can create horrible dread by recreating the third act as a sort of reversed first wherein the resolution restores a terrible status-quo, but in doing any of these you have not reinvented the three-act structure. Rather, you have used it as intended: a cultural trope or framework upon which to grow, expand and contrive.
Like ivy crawling up a trellis, structure exists to be used. To venerate the structure as is often the case with elementary school teachers, canon junkies, and short-sighted graduate students just looking to cram the next generation of freshmen through their degree factory, is to look at that bare and disused trellis and call it a thing of beauty. To write ignorant of convention is to invert the metaphor: that a plant growing unwanted and uncontained is a weed to be plucked out and tossed away.
So to summarize: Act one, act two, act three. There's nothing wrong with it. People are going to love and hate your plots whether you follow it or not, so you should learn to use it. I've seen this go terribly awry - the young lady who decided to plot a story based on a wiccan idea of recurrence in threes (it was utterly nonsensical to someone not trained to read it as such), the young man who wrote an illustrated self-referential story in which the main character was named "narrator" who still continued to narrate the story on the page (there was no resolution, only a very dull juxtaposition of two lame second acts), and of course thousands and thousands of two-fisted action yarns that are so eager to jump into the punching and blood and guts and screwing that they completely neglect to tell you who is so visceral, or why.
The old practices are not there to hurt you, but to guide you. Learn them and grow from them.
0 comments:
Post a Comment