Storytellersunplugged

by Gerard Houarner

So this is “frames” business is yet another metaphor for writing, applicable in particular, I think, to scenes, the bricks a writer uses to create the structure of a story.

Abstract, I know. That’s all I’ve got. Nothing warm and fuzzy. So much of life seems to be about how we view what’s going on in the world and what we do about it. Filters, frames, they’re just the color of the lenses we looking through. As I said when I started this blogging business, I’m going through my own process over here. Visualizing. Interpreting. Throwing stuff out there. Maybe something will work for somebody. Maybe nobody’s paying attention. So it goes.

If a “picture is worth a thousand words,” how many fewer words can you get away with and still get the picture? Maybe even get something the picture can’t convey?

Photographer friends talk about “framing” a picture, and, of course, film is all about narrowing down the chaos and randomness of setting and background and interactions into a mesmerizing block of light, shadow and color on a screen. Looking at a scene as it’s being filmed, you wonder what kind of sense it’s going to make. But punch that final cut up on a screen and reality’s taken on a new flavor.

 The frame has cut down reality to a manageable, even more meaningful, chunk of input.

Or, screw in a pair of ear buds and turn up your private sound track, and suddenly you’re the star of your own movie screening just for you inside your head. You’ve framed your world with music.

I guess you could also call frames a kind of “filter,” which I talked about last month. But for some reason, the concept is more visceral for me, a bit less abstract, more of an actual tool for the storytelling process than a psychological mind set.

Poe talks about making every line in a (short) story build character or advance action. Everything matters, everything has meaning (unlike life, unless you’re a spiritual individual). There’s a focus to a story that’s unlike most things we experience in life. Its power is in our need for meaning, or, in the case of more modern philosophical perspectives, our point of view on existence.

A “frame” is just another way of looking at this need (on the part of “writer/story” as well as “reader”).

To make every line matter, it might help to look at the entire story in a frame – the old “movie going on in my head” trick, or a broad mural spread across an alley wall.

But, of course, that’s a lot to ask, holding on to an entire story in one’s head. To really get a handle on those pesky relevant and irrelevant details, that big picture might need to get broken down to each scene, exchange, piece of action, like a “storyboard” of a movie (or an actual graphic story) which summarizes the essence of a bit of action in a single image. Or, if you’re more language-oriented, a series of haiku, poems, zen koans, jokes, sub-titles, or who knows what else.

 If you want to be concrete about it, yes, an outline.  But I’m going for something more inspiring, something that captures the emotional subtext of the story for the writer, and the reader.   I’m thinking more like bits of dialogue, images, phrases, touchstones you want to reach.

Whatever the technique, I’m really talking about are short cuts that capture broad actions or events which also serve as banners around which relevant details can rally.

Some of you may need to jam that frame with all kinds of stuff – research, lines, background, setting, just general cool stuff. I know I can have piles of notes for a piece, even a scene, and then the sickening realization comes over me that it’s not all going to fit. It’s not all relevant to what’s really going on. The frame is bursting.

In that sense of story as picture, what goes on in a single frame of the overall narrative needs to propel the viewer to an (emotional) reaction, spark an (intellectual) insight. What’s going on in the frame is a combination of balance and motion guiding the reader along to the next part of the story’s journey.

The picture in that frame should be of the most important thing happening in that particular part of the story, just as (as it’s been said by Howard Waldrop) a story is about the most important thing happening in a character’s life (I qualified that one in a past blog, but really, who am I to do so?).

So if a picture is worth a thousand words, and you’ve got a that many banging around in your head about what’s going on in the scene, zoom in on that picture and instead of describing or noting every last thing, find the ones that matter only to the character and the action.

To make it less abstract, you have an opening: a page and a half to grab a reader’s attention and get them interested in what happens next. That’s your hook, your splash page, the first view of action that matters to characters and folks looking in. That’s a frame.

There are consequences to what happens in that first frame. Reactions. Subtle or grand, the choices and decisions unfold, each in its own frame, until an ending (of some kind, and I know how you post-modernists love those endings that don’t really end) is reached.

Yes, there are other ideas, cool bits, but do they really belong to this particular story? Do they develop the character so the reader understands why choices are made that lead to the ending? Are they relevant?

For me, picturing each scene or part of a story in its own frame sometimes helps to contain it (nd me). Not always successfully, of course. And, of course, like many of us I usually have at best only a general idea or a situation in mind for an ending, so that opening is subject to continued scrutiny as the story develops, twists, changes.

As the story progresses, I find myself adding and deleting stuff from previous sections because they were either missing and necessary to achieve the ending, or became irrelevant. That opening is usually the most revised part of a story, for me. Sometimes it’s like a damned Picasso, just layers of stuff re-structured and re-painted. If I were wiser, better, etc, I’m sure the whole story would be attacked the same way. (The Mystery of Picasso documentary offers a fascinating view of the transformations possible by digging deeper into what going’s on in the frame – and that’s just from a visual perspective.)

Anyway, if you’re the type of writer who finds breaking down a story to smaller parts meaningful (and I know most of you are actually saying to yourselves – wtf? I just write until there’s nothing left to say and then I cash my check and move on to the next project), then the idea of a frame can help focus on what’s important and what’s not in each part, and through the overall arc of the story.

For each frame, like a painting, there’s light and shading to consider, literally, in the realm of the sensory details you include to make the scene and characters come alive, and in the style of writing – the words you choose, pacing, level and use of detail. And all of that detail is showing the motion of characters literally or symbolically heading somewhere.

 A thousand words may be needed to describe that picture, but since visual and verbal processes are different, you probably don’t need those thousand words.  The cool thing about writing is that you can pare down that picture, make the frame smaller, cut to the next bit faster than even a movie.  Or, you can go deeper, shade and color character for more complex textures, richer meaning in both character and plot.

Well, if frames and Poe don’t work for you, here are a few other comments I’ve taken on my photography which may help just as much from the vantage point of writing.

Don’t take flat pictures, look for angles, lines or details in a flat surface to bring perspective and depth to an image.

Character is in the eyes.

Look behind and around your subject in the frame for distractions, then move or get closer to edit them out of the frame.

Put the lens cap back on and just walk away –

Wait a minute, that’s not helpful for taking pictures or telling stories.

Dammit, everybody’s a critic…