3 rules

The Fight is the Story (part 1)

Since I will only have a mere 15 minutes for my DCC presentation this year, I thought it’d behoove everyone interested if I posted my more detailed thoughts about what I’ll be discussing Saturday, so that folks with inquiring minds can get the full effect of my presentation. This year, I’ll be talking solely about The Three Rules for Actors, how they apply to plot, and how fight scenes fit in with that. For background on these rules, see the following two older posts, one about the Three Rules in writing, and one about the Three Rules in warriorship. Read these articles first, so you can be familiar with the concept of OBJECTIVE, TACTICS, and OBSTACLES.

The basic thesis of my presentation “The Fight is the Story” is twofold: 1) a fight scene needs to be an essential part of the overarching story itself; 2) a fight scene needs to tell a story alone, too: a fight should be physical storytelling. Too often, fight scenes are shoehorned into stories (especially in this Age Of The Superhero Blockbuster), where they have no place, aren’t interesting or necessary, and are completely gratuitous. Why does this happen? Why, because fight scenes are cool. Empirically. But let me explain further:

1) Whenever a character speaks, what that actually is is TACTICS. The only reason a character ever opens her mouth is as a TACTIC to obtain her OBJECTIVE. When she has run out of words–that is, when each one of her verbal tactics has failed, then and only then does she resort to physical ones. This is (or, should be) the only reason a fight scene occurs. When the words run out, that’s when the fight happens. Actually, it’s my opinion that this is why fights happen in real life, too. But I digress…

So when I’m choreographing a fight scene for a play, I look at the whole script. I ask myself (and often the director) the following vital questions: Why does this fight have to happen here, now? Why between these characters? Why these weapons? What about all these things are vital TACTICS, to bring the characters to what OBJECTIVE? What do the characters want, that they are fighting to get it? Often directors will be surprised at how little actual fighting needs to be seen onstage.

2) Each move within a fight scene is a TACTIC to gain an OBJECTIVE in and of itself. Each thing a character does physically is to move him closer to his OBJECTIVE. When a fight scene in cinema has too much CGI, or too many cuts, the viewer can’t see what the TACTICS actually are, and so loses the thread of what should be physical storytelling.

EXAMPLE ONE: The Phantom Menace

So, let’s talk about 1): Why these characters, here and now? What is Darth Maul’s OBJECTIVE? What is Qui-Gon Jinn’s? Obi-Wan seems to be rather tagging along with his teacher, but it’s unclear what his OBJECTIVE is, either, except for one brief and fleeting moment (which I’ll talk about in a minute). Are the Jedi protecting the Queen? Well, no, it doesn’t seem like Maul is really threatening her, and she’s off being a badass with her army somewhere else anyway. The only thing I can see here is Jedi vs. Sith. No reason for the fight to happen, here and now, and the only reason I can even tell who’re the good guys and who’s the bad guy is that the good guys are white men dressed in light earth tones, and the bad guy looks like an amalgam of multiple cultures’ portrayals of demons and devils through history. Sorry, but it’s true: nothing in this fight needs to be happening now, as far as the over-arching plot goes (such as it is). Are the Jedi wanting to kill the Sith, or disarm him? Doesn’t seem like either, at least not judging from any of the moves seen here. And what’s Maul trying to do? Besides show off his aerial cartwheel skills? Which brings me to:

2): NOBODY IS TRYING TO DO ANYTHING TO ANYONE ELSE. There are ZERO physical tactics going on here, and no OBJECTIVES to speak of at all. Seriously. Look at it. Now, a lightsaber is a pretty versatile weapon: you can stab, cut, sever, throw and catch, and even do stuff to the environment to advantage. Is any of that happening? No. Not for any tactical reason anyway. It’s all for show. There’s a lot of spinning going on, both of blades and of bodies, for no reason (and yes, Virginia, I am a martial artist and I do know what spins are actually for in martial arts. Nobody is spinning anything for any of those reasons). The lightsaber blades are literally meeting in the air between characters, like kids playing with sticks in the park.

There’s one brief moment of a clear OBJECTIVE: when Qui-Gon Jinn is killed. Obi-Wan then suddenly, clearly, and beautifully shows us (FINALLY!!) a reason he’s fighting. He doesn’t have to speak it for it to be apparent: “You killed my teacher; I’m going to kill you!” However, that OBJECTIVE promptly disappears into the purposeless, spinning choreography as soon as it starts up again, and Ewan MacGregor’s brilliant acting reverts once again to Dancer Face.

My conclusion? The only reason this fight scene is here is that the writers suddenly realized, “Oh shit! We don’t have a big spectacular lightsaber fight scene yet! The movie’s almost over! Quick, put one in!” Because fight scenes are cool, and lightsabers some of the coolest. Thing is: if the only lightsaber fight was that brief drive-by encounter on Tatooine, earlier, that would have been much more compelling, much more impactful, and would have made a whole lot more sense. Think about it: Maul has a specific OBJECTIVE for having done that quick fight. His purpose was to reveal himself, scare the midichlorians out of the Jedi, and leave them freaking out. That way, we wonder with the Jedi: what the heck is gonna happen in the next movie? Was that the master, or the apprentice? What will they do next? (Of course, those of us nerdy enough to remember that the Emperor’s name was Palpatine in ep. 6 would totally know this, but still!)

Stay tuned for Part Two, where I Roger-Ebert a *good* example of a lightsaber fight scene.

Three Rules For Warriorship

I think this may have been preserved in Daily Cross-Swords’ Blogger iteration, but as long as I’m re-sharing 3 Rules posts, this from my brain in 2009.   ~Jenn

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Acting’s Magic Three Rules in Warriorship

A while back, I wrote about how the Three Rules from Acting training (objective, tactics, obstacles) served as guidelines for writing strong prose—I renamed them the Three Rules for Protagonists. As I did so, I noticed that the Three Rules also apply to the martial arts. Having recently weeded through a bunch of old MFA musings re: the Three Rules and Mamet’s “Where Do You Put the Camera?” (from On Directing, a book which I highly recommend for theatrical and literary folk) it hit me that his theories of simplicity in filmmaking had everything to do with warriorship and the Three Rules.

Whew. Let me begin my explanation with a Mamet quote (from the abovementioned piece):

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something. As long as the protagonist is clearly going out and attempting to get that something, the audience will wonder whether or not he’s going to succeed. The moment the protagonist, or the auteur of the movie, stops trying to get something and starts trying to influence someone, the audience will go to sleep.

As long as an action fulfills the protagonist’s objective, then it’s a strong choice. If it’s merely interesting and only interesting, it will not actually be interesting to the viewer. The same holds true for writing: the minute a writer stops writing beautiful, interesting prose and concerns herself with “what do I want” (Rule 1), she will begin to write gripping works of whatever genre. Mamet calls this “uninflected” which I love as a term for this idea of unadorned, simple, compelling work.

How does this relate to warriorship? In the martial arts, it’s so easy to fall into what I call the “coolness” trap; it’s the same trap both actors and writers fall into. It’s irresistible to the ego to write interesting stuff; to be interesting onstage: in other words, to appear cool. The ego doesn’t want to look boring or plain, it wants to look cool. It seems contrary that the least interesting choice is actually the strongest, and that the less information you give a reader/audience, the better they will get into the story. The exact same thing happens to a martial artist: we see so much over-the-top action in films that look so cool: wire-fu, elaborate long fight sequences, sleek catsuits, macho setups for sport fighting like cages. The problem for the artist’s ego is that the really cool-looking stuff of martial arts is in fact the least effective in a real fight. Same for an actor, same for a writer. And now I’m writing this, it occurs to me that we could probably say this for any art form…

Me and Kim S. in her brown belt demo, Boulder Quest Center, 2009. I'm the one doing the no-handed roll.

Me and Kim S. in her brown belt demo, Boulder Quest Center, 2009. I’m the one doing the no-handed roll.

The Three Rules For Warriorship:

1)      What do I want? (Objective) –do I want to attack or defend myself? Do I want to cause harm? What specifically do I want to do, physically? How do I want the fight to end?

2)       What do I do to get what I want? (Tactics) –What actions specifically do I need to achieve my objective? Weak or waffly (or “cool”) choices here will fail, in a much more obvious way than just a mediocre performance or piece of writing. In a martial arts situation, a weak tactic leads to a smack in the head or even a fatality (or a lost match, if we’re talking sport martial arts).

3)      What stands in my way? (Obstacles) –is my opponent’s guard up? Armor or weapons involved? Are there innocents anywhere? Is the law on my side? Is the space restricted, either physically or otherwise?

What’s the conclusion here? That good art should be “uninflected, … requiring no additional gloss” (Mamet again). Keep it simple. Which, of course, is the most difficult thing about mastery.

 

Three Rules: The Monomyth Revisited

Since I’m starting this blog over again, I’m reposting (as opposed to riposting) some of the meatier posts from the past. This is actually a re-repost, as it is an old lecturette for a now-defunct DU course I designed and taught back in the day, called Writers on Writing. I’s my take on Campbell’s theory of the monomyth. Please to enjoy.   ~Jenn

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Three Rules for Protagonists: the Monomyth Revisited               

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.[1]

Back in acting school, we learned a magic Three Rules that we were to adhere to whenever we performed a new character (which was often a couple times a week).  No matter how big a role, the Three Rules for Actors worked to make a performance authentic, dynamic, and compelling.

When an actor plays a mood, she dissolves instantly into sham.  Mood spelled backwards is Doom for the actor.[2]In other words, if one “plays sad” the performance will seem false and cheesy to an audience. If one plays a verb, an objective, then one is playing an action instead of an emotion.

Three Rules for Actors:

“What do I want?” (objective)

“What do I do to get what I want?” (tactics)

“What stands in my way?”  (obstacles)

Actors ask these three questions of themselves as the character they’ve been assigned, and often will write verbs in the margins of their scripts (tactics = action words) to guide them along the scenes.  Any story can be boiled down to this formula. A character does actions to get her objective. When one action doesn’t work, she’ll try another. And the audience will want to know what she’ll do next, and if she’ll end up achieving her objective. When the character either achieves her objective, or discovers it can’t be achieved, the story is over. A new objective is a new story.

These three rules, though taught to actors, I have found to be essential in the understanding of story structure. A writer can ask their protagonist these three questions and the narrative nearly writes itself. Ray Bradbury probably never heard the Actor’s Rules, but his story-writing instructions are a direct reiteration of the objective/tactics/obstacles formula:

Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story.[3]

This formula works for anything narrative—fiction, non-fiction, or (obviously) drama. Poetry is about image and sound, so it doesn’t go by the Actor’s Rules. But anything that has events, things happening, a central character (even the writer-as-narrator of a personal essay) has added dynamism and a clean plot if the Three Rules are kept in mind.

Image

Being shown the ropes. At Metro’s theatre department, 2014. See what I did there?

This is where a lot of what’s called “literary fiction” falls into traps, and genre fiction writers get carried away.

Writers are faced with so much that is less than artistic sitting on the bookshelves, many wonder what they can do to be noticed by an inundated publisher or agent, and, not wanting to “sell out,” they try and write really, really good stuff. This is the problem. If a writer adds too much to the Three Rules above, it’s like adding too much stuff to a base skeleton: it becomes an overweight monstrosity that’s dressed in too many clashing layers of clothes. As Philip Pullman said in his Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech,

…in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship.”[4]

And what happens to the genre writers? They put the same flesh and clothes on the skeleton that hundreds have done before them, but those hundreds did it better. What results from the genre writers is a cheaply made clone that’s not any better than fan-fiction (and worse than some).

What to do?

Really, the answer is simple (which is what makes it so frakking difficult to execute). It has to do with Mamet’s statement of simplicity in storytelling:

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something. As long as the protagonist is clearly going out and attempting to get that something, the audience will wonder whether or not he’s going to succeed. The moment the protagonist, or the auteur of the movie, stops trying to get something and starts trying to influence someone, the audience will go to sleep.[5]

In other words, stop trying to be a good writer. Just follow your character’s strong desire, and it will become a compelling story. That’s it. Don’t write a masterpiece of linguistic gymnastics with “a prophylactic garnish of irony.”[6] That’s not what people who want books want to read. People want stories, they’ll watch movies or play video games to get stories; or as the pithy Pullman says again, “We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them.”[7]

I’ve had writing students struggle against this: they cry, “But if all stories are just the Three Rules, then anything I write won’t be original?!” Writers shouldn’t be afraid of this, the Three Rules for All Story, any more than they should be afraid of their own skeletons. I mean, think about it: if you stand my skeleton and your skeleton next to each other, there’d be hardly any noticeable difference. It’s the flesh and clothes and actions we take that make us different from each other, original works of art.

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ENDNOTES

[1] Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

[2] Uttered by many of my previous acting profs, at CU Boulder and a couple UNC seminars.

[3] From Zen in the Art of Writing

[4] From http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/author/carnegie.html

[5] From Mamet’s On Directing Film

[6] Pullman’s speech again

[7] Ibid.

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SOURCES

Bradbury, Ray, Zen in the Art of Writing. Joshua Odell Editions. Santa Barbara, CA: 1994.

Mamet, David. On Directing Film. Penguin. New York: 1992.

Pullman, Philip. “Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech,” His Dark Materials. 2008. Accessed 11/9/09. Available: <http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/author/carnegie.html&gt;