A good story can make us devote ourselves wholeheartedly, forget all about eating and sleeping, and forget the outside world. It seems that we have become a part of the story, following the protagonist, either sad or happy, or afraid or brave.
Good stories always make us want to stop, and we always expect more similar stories to make us more enjoyable. Then, how are gripping stories written, and how can we learn from the popular dramas and novels around us? This is the problem that this paper tries to discuss.
Story is the most primitive and advanced art form. Humans have been producing stories since their appearance. In ancient times, the ancients recorded stories by tying ropes. After the appearance of writing, four literary genres, poetry, prose, novel and drama, are also expressing stories.
Poems such as Song of Eternal Sorrow, the tortuous love story between Tang Minghuang and Yang Yuhuan. Prose, such as Mr. Zhu Ziqing's "The Back of Modern Times", is a model of telling the deep fatherly love. In A Dream of Red Mansions and other novels, Bao Dai's past lives entanglements are touching. Plays like The Peony Pavilion show the strange experiences of Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei.
It can be seen that the story is the carrier of expressing feelings.
The definition of story should return to the word "story" itself. "So" is the cause and causal logic. "Things" represent events. A story is an event composed of causal logic sequences.
The essence of the story is two words-accident.
No one likes a bland story. Once there is an accident and a turning point, you can watch it. A good story will not follow the normal thinking logic of people. Degang Guo once said, "Your baggage and jokes are beyond the imagination of the audience.
Otherwise, he won't buy tickets in the future. "
(1) A structure: three-act structure
Beginning, development and ending, this "three acts" structure is the most classic story structure.
At the beginning of a story, the protagonist usually gets into trouble. The first few hundred words of the novel or the first five minutes of the movie are all about the difficulties of the protagonist. Some people say that the success of a novel depends on the first 100 words, that is, whether the main contradiction of the novel has been explained at the beginning.
With the development of the story, the protagonist begins to struggle with difficulties or some people. This kind of struggle, struggle or intensity will make the story more interesting. One contradiction has been solved, and another contradiction has emerged. The density of this contradiction determines whether the story is compact or not.
The ending of the story is either sad or happy. Many people like happy endings. Because of the sense of substitution, people are more willing to regard themselves as the protagonist of the story, and the ending of comedy can satisfy people's fantasies. The tragic ending can touch people's hearts even more. We often remember the ending of tragedy best.
The reason why the "three acts" structure is enduring is that it conforms to the law of the development of things. As small as a person getting up in the morning and resting at night, as big as a person's birth, illness and death, they can be disassembled into a "three-act" structure.
(2) A system: lock system
Put forward by James Scott Bell, an American best-selling author, LOCK refers to: L (protagonist) protagonist, O (goal) goal, C (conflict) conflict, and K (knockout) impact ending.
Take the story of the palace as an example. L- protagonist: Wei, O- goal: go to the palace to find the murderer who killed her sister. C- conflict: she wants revenge, but she finds that she is no match for Yu Yu, the murderer. K- ending: designing lightning to kill Yu, but she is sent to the lover's library, and she encounters a greater crisis.
What needs special emphasis is that the ending is not an ordinary ending, but an "influence". If The Story of Yan Xi Palace ends with Wei and Fu Heng, it is far less memorable than the ending of two lovers in different ways! We often say that when writing a novel, there should be a "phoenix head, pig belly and leopard tail" and a loud and powerful ending. That's the reason.
(1) The plot is strong, bringing forth the old and bringing forth the new.
Or take The Story of Yan Xi Palace as an example:
The plot is compact, and the heroine Wei is constantly in crisis. However, in every crisis, the screenwriter keeps the plot of his successful revenge within two episodes, which makes the whole story look compact and full, with climax after climax (popularly speaking, there is no "urine point" in the whole process).
In contrast, Ruyi's Imperial Love in the Palace is better than Yan's in cast and publicity, but the story is relatively protracted, which reduces the audience's sense of experience, so its reputation is weaker than Yan's.
In terms of personnel design, creating a "black lotus" for the heroine Wei changed the image of "Bai Lianhua" in previous plays, clearly revenged love and hate, and subverted the audience's inherent cognition, which is also an important factor for its success.
(2) Three-dimensional full digital arc
(This article was originally explained by teacher Chen Qing in Xiaoxiang, taking Honey as Heavy as Frost as an example, but I haven't seen the play, that is, taking A Dream of Red Mansions as an example. )
Take Granny Liu in A Dream of Red Mansions as an example. She is humble and embarrassed. Her gestures in the Grand View Garden reveal ignorance, but she has self-esteem. She knows that being funny and amused are helpless. She also knows how to repay her kindness, and finally even borrowed money to redeem Pinger, who has been kind to herself, from the brothel.
She has both advantages and unique disadvantages. What we see is not an illusion above reality, but a living person. The three-dimensional and full-bodied characterization makes you think after reading it: "Well, someone around me has his shadow."
There are more than 480 famous people with surnames in A Dream of Red Mansions, and there are hundreds of people introduced by pen and ink of four families, but each person has his own distinctive characteristics. Such a huge relationship between people can be remembered after reading it, and the author's superb technique can be seen.
(3) plot reversal
In the scene of "Blood Test of the Queen in the Palace", there were many reversals, which firmly broke the nerves of the audience.
The queen wants to test brother Liu's blood. Everyone knows that Brother Liu is actually his son, so everyone is worried. We all breathed a sigh of relief when we heard that Qi Guiren reported that she had an affair with Wen. But when Wen and Liu's blood merged, everyone became nervous again.
Zhen Xuan suspected that there was something wrong with the water, so he dropped Su Peisheng's blood into it, and the result was harmonious, so he confirmed that the water had been tampered with by the Queen. Later, Yu Rao invited witnesses outside the palace to confirm that Zhen Xuan was framed; Then Dr. Wen brandished a knife from the palace, and his eyebrows were strong and his blood collapsed during childbirth ... one after another, which made the audience want to stop.
There are many similar plots in the Queen of the Palace, and the "reversal" echoes the essence of the story "accident". A few years ago, some spy war dramas and palace fighting dramas that were criticized by everyone were mostly produced by scriptwriters with the same assembly line. The shoddy work makes the audience think of the end when they see the beginning, without accident or reversal. Of course, the audience didn't buy it.
(4) Set an ending for your character that only belongs to him.
At the end of the movie Farewell My Concubine, after the ups and downs of life, Cheng Dieyi met his beloved younger brother Duan Xiaolou again after a lapse of 22 years, and they cooperated on the stage for the last time. Finally, Cheng Dieyi threw his sword into the arms of his brother in the unique way of his famous concubine. It is a sentence that runs through the whole film, "Don't be crazy, don't live."
However, the characters in the novel Farewell My Concubine all ended in a dull ending: Cheng Duan and his wife put on makeup and sang Farewell My Concubine, and they never met again. Obviously, this treatment makes the characters lack tension in the film and fails to sublimate the whole film at the end.
Write at the end:
As teacher Chen Qing in Xiaoxiang said, there are many good stories around us, such as TV, movies and novels. When we read it, there are all kinds of stories, but the writing techniques behind them are similar, and they are all inseparable from the basic structure and skills.
When reading, we should consciously interpret the author's techniques, disassemble the story structure and Taskmaster's writing style, and constantly refine and summarize them into our own things, so as to make progress. Otherwise, it is a waste of time to brush more plays.