Vernacular: story events

A STORY EVENT creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character, that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value, and is achieved through conflict.

[Robert McKee--STORY]

Vernacular: story values

STORY VALUES are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.

Ex: alive/dead, love/hate, freedom/slavery, truth/lie, courage/cowardice, loyalty/betrayal, wisdom/stupidity, strength/weakness, excitement/boredom, good/evil, right/wrong, life/death, justice/injustice, self-awareness/self-deception

[Robert McKee--STORY]

Conflict

External Conflict should illuminate the internal conflict, and Internal Conflict should impact the External Conflict.

Heads up: Conflict

This week's Craft topic is Conflict. Look for "Conflict" posts on Wednesday.

Goals

Story goals should be both measurable and explicitly defined.

Jimmy joins a boxing league.
So?

Jimmy joins a boxing league because he wants to impress a girl.
Defined, but not measurable.

Jimmy joins a boxing league because if he *wins*, Susie will go out with him.
Whether Susie goes out with him or not is measurable because it’s visual, clear cut, obvious. Either she does, or she doesn’t.

Scene goals should work the same way. Don’t just have your characters sitting around the coffee table yapping (or worse, laying in bed ruminating on their lives) when you can have them striving toward an unambiguous goal.

Where there’s goals, there can be opposition—and where there’s opposition, there’s conflict. Conflict turns pages. Conflict is good.

Inherent Conflict

One way to guarantee conflict in your story is to have protagonists with directly competing goals or outlooks.

An oft-used example is "the fireman and the arsonist". We also see the FBI agent and the hacker, the cop and the vigilante, and so on.

But keep in mind that conflict doesn't equal career. Inherent conflict can come from very basic outlooks on life.

Ex:
Rule follower vs Rule breaker
Globe Trotter vs Homebody
Orderly mind vs the free spirit
Ends Justify Means vs Follow Procedure
Introvert vs Extrovert
Reliability vs Impulsivity

GMC

GMC stands for Goal, Motivation, and Conflict. This term was popularized by Deb Dixon, who does workshops and published a book on this topic.

Basically, the theory is this: All primary or secondary characters worthy of appearing in your story should have GMC, which can change over the course of the story and which can be expressed as follows:

[Character] wants [Goal] because [Motivation], but [conflict].

This is also one way to set up your story pitch when querying editors and agents.

EX: Susie wants to marry Johnny because she just found out she's pregnant with his baby, but she's engaged to Johnny's scary biker brother and the wedding's tomorrow morning.