Story
Keys are the uniquely intense and dramatic situations that a
reader or viewer naturally remembers about a story.
In Gone With The Wind - The Movie one intense moment is
Scarlet O’Hara’s moment of being alone when other hopes are dashed
and picking up a handful of earth from Tara, symbolizing that no
matter what she would hold onto Tara, her ancestral home, when all
else collapses.
Steven Seagal in the Movie, Above The Law, is tied to the
chair and about to be tortured and he breaks out of it with
superhuman effort and kills his adversary.
Yes, you could say, only in a movie. Yet, you relish that moment
when all seems lost and the hero manages to triumph.
There is a strong message from this intense moment that each and
any of us can get out of a difficult situation if we focus all our
strength and skills.
Another message is that sometimes the impossible works.
Yes, and at other times in real life we get overwhelmed or killed.
We do not survive difficult situations. While it might not be a
death threat, how do you survive or triumph over a marriage
breaking down?
This real life example is one many of us face. Steven Seagal has
been through three divorces.
In divorce, as I know myself, you lose your image of being the
right person, the right lover and hero for this other person in
love bond with you. You die!
Thus there are life situations in which we do not triumph. Seagal,
without knowing details, lost out in real life. Love with a certain
person ended for him. With two of the wives he had children also.
So he must have lost out in terms of being a steady father to his
children.
Which is to say that life itself is full of problems. Sometimes we
can solve them and triumph over them. Sometimes we cannot.
The hero action movie is a mythic archetype, not a real life
situation usually.
Such a movie with an actor like Seagal gives us a high, a life, a
drug high by identifying with the heroic archetype. We may not be
all that successful in real life in some ways but through
identifying with the movie hero we can experience success as an
emotion vicariously.
Seagal is not destroying our enemies for us. We are Seagal
destroying enemies.
Thus STORY KEYS are primal
archetypal moments in drama that symbolize common, important life
situations.
Here we have been talking about turning Defeat into Victory as a Story Key.
Make sure your novel or play has about twelve of them.
Make a list of possible Story
Keys, Pivotal Scenes
that will be memorable to the reader or viewer.
All the other matrices of your complete story will be
interconnections, elaborations and amplifications of your 12 story
keys.
Think Big, Act Big, Be Bigger Than
Life. Yet represent life with your Story Keys.
In The Writer’s Interface you will find places
where suggestions about story keys are put in for developing
Story Lines and Story Themes.
A Story Theme is an overarching
key life context and issue dramatized. Your Story Keys are intense nodes of action and
meaning along the way, the storylines, that dramatize the two or
three main Story Themes.
