An Essay by Mark Mallon
With commentary by Mark Mallon, and his alter-ego, Tom

A good story does not merely need the attention of the audience, it captures it, it guides it. Since each element must collaborate with the rest in some way, the audience must trust that it will. Its mere existence is the promise of collaboration, and unless it delivers, the audience will feel their trust betrayed.

Three words: Tim Burton's Batman. Talk about a movie that delivers. Not a single scene in there that doesn't contribute to the mood, the plot, or the scale of the movie.

So the first step is to know what the effort is meant to deliver. With this knowledge, each event can be planned, the trip from point A to point D mapped out. At this stage, there still remains the possibility that superfluous events might still be part of the make-up. Leave them in there for now, if only for an understanding of the timing. Which brings us to step two.

The second step is to understand the timing. If the story is simply linear, with a simple chain of events leading toward their conclusion, then this step is already finished. If, however, you have a story with multiple characters, multiple roles, then you have multiple chains to follow toward the common conclusion. There are rare cases in which each chain in turn can be followed alone all the way through, but this is generally a clumsy way to proceed, leaving the audience feeling unsatisfied with one chain while another is being explored. So the preferred way to proceed is by breaking each chain into smaller sections, usually punctuated with minor cliffhangers.

Ever watch Square One? It ended with Math Net. It was only five minutes at the end of each episode of Square One, and each full episode of Math Net was about a half-hour. It had to keep its viewers interested enough to watch six episodes in a row. They were very good at that. The music helped. Bah ba-dum bum... Bah ba-dum bum BUM!

Yeah, you know that music came from Dragnet, right? Anyway...

It is here that timing comes into play, when you choreograph the sections, your scenes, to overlap the important events and the superfluous ones. In this way, you maintain the integrity of your timelines, while also ensuring that you will not lose the trust of the audience by wasting their time. In most cases, the timelines will interact with each other, not just overlapping for your own convenience, but becoming dependent on one another in order for either to proceed. At this point, the scene layout becomes unique to the individual story, and so it can no longer be discussed universally, thus effectively ending step two.

An example of complete disregard for all of this is Prophecy 3, the weak ending to a series that started off so promising. The doctor character saw something that made him go on a research binge. When the doctor went on his research binge, he did it merely to show the audience what there was to see. He didn't have any further contact with the protagonist. He didn't tell anyone about what he found. He wasn't even seen again in the movie, if I remember correctly.

It's worth noting that in the original movie, this function was not his: it belonged to the main character, the one who actually needed the information.

I liked the first prophecy movie.

Step three is the construction of the actual scenes. In step two, a bare layout of what scenes had to take place was made. This layout is integral to step three, as each event in any one chain must lead into the next. Therefore, every action taken by any character within any one section must be planned with the next in mind. Every word, every choice, every joke, must take them one step further toward reaching the objective in the way you want them to. This means not only arrival, but reaction and attitude. It is in the spirit of these last two that the characters’ personalities are designed. And so in order to complete step three, one must digress into the integral outstep of character design.

I call it an outstep because it has no absolute position in the order of construction. It can be completed along with the third and final phase of story development, or it can be in place before the beginning of the first, as is usually the case with series, be they on television or in print. The audience must be made aware of who the characters are, and how they would react in the situations they find themselves in for the story. This is done either during their trek through the story, at their introduction, or through reference and/or flashback during moments during which it might seem, to an uneducated audience, like “nothing is happening.”In fact, these moments, when they exist, are carefully chosen to pace the story while telling the audience important details about the character in question.

Like the scene they cut out of The Exorcist, where the priests discussed why the devil would choose a child. In my opinion, it helped to set up the priest's motivation to do what he did to end it. It was a little preachy the first time through--He did it 'cause he's a priest, and priests are men of God, and--and so on and so forth.

Leave nothing to assumption, not even the goodness or badness of your characters.

In the case of non-fiction stories, the outstep is not unnecessary, only simpler: if the person is known to the audience, the outstep has been completed for the storyteller; if not, then creation is complete and all the storyteller has to do is communicate the information. If the story is not about the person but the events, then the information about how the character responds in certain situations must be given before it becomes relevant; if the person and his or her habits are the focus, or even just -a- focus of the story, then they are revealed through the choices or actions in question when they happen. Most good stories employ a combination of event- and plot-development, combining the two approaches described in this paragraph.

I once watched a movie in which a guy made a wish about a baseball game from his past, and history changed. In the last half-hour of the movie, one of the minor characters pulled a gun and started shooting, and one of the more major characters committed murder...which I suppose was the point of the shooter... but he used a golf club. No one was expecting them to do those things.

The severity of their actions was nowhere near set up, but this was not their story, and the main character reacted to the unexpected in a way that was appropriate to his character set-up. The verdict: it was a very good movie.

Releasing information before its relevance is at the very core of the rule of keeping the audience’s trust. The release of information generally requires a minor story of its own. This minor story can be an entire chapter of a book, or an entire episode of a series. Therefore, if the information is released, IT MUST BE RELEVANT. If the storyteller changes the plan and doesn’t remove the material in question, or removes or forgets the reason for its existence, then the audience has devoted time and mental energy into understanding something that will give them nothing in return. This is how audience trust is lost.

We once rented this ridiculous movie. Bad guys kept running into the scene by the hundreds, just to get killed by whichever good guy was in the scene. The mysterious ultimate assassin woman killed some people with her hat and a fire hose. The cop posed dramatically every time he fired off a couple of shots. Since he fired a few dozen shots from his 9mm in about thirty seconds, we figured he must have been exhausted. Good thing he was about to die in the explosion, since his lover was dying of the poison. What confused us was why she drank all the milk. She announced, quite out of the blue, that the milk would save her from the poison. Still, the poison worked, the house blew up(I can't remember the bomb), and we still don't know why the men chained up in the basement were rabid. Or how they got there. Or why.

What the hell are you watching!