Why things happen in stories

Hello again.

Today I want to talk to you about why things that happen in stories happen. In the stories.
Why I want to talk about is because first of all, it's a really difficult thing. Sometimes when writing a story you come to a situation where you know what should happen, but it seems to not be happening. A little like what you explained about on Friday. The story starts to live its own life.
And, secondly, the book I read for the exam a couple of weeks ago talked some about this. More specifically it was a book about the theory of audiovisual story telling. Meaning movies. But I'm pretty sure what the book said about this can also be applied to the written format.

So, basically the point was this: from the point of view of analysing a movie, there are four kinds of motivation for a thing to be or happen in the movie.

The first, and possibly least interesting from the point of view of writing a story, is artistic motivation. Basically when you have a weird art movie, this includes all the stuff that is there purely for the art. I guess there could be stuff in a book just for the art, but I suppose (I may be wrong) there isn't all that much of that there. I suppose art movies is a thing, but you don't really write a book just for the art. You write because of the story. Or what do I know, I suppose there could be a book written for the art of writing.
Oh, I guess poetry.
Though I'm not sure if that counts, because I'm talking about prose. Books that tell a story. So I'm not sure if poetry works here. Though I guess maybe poem books are the art films of books.

Moving on.

The second (they're not actually in any order) kind of motivation has got to do with the narrative. It's basically all the things that happen in a movie (or a book, I guess) because it's necessary for the story that they happen. The book I read had an example that in horror movies the heroine has to be told to go sit in a room alone to be safe, obviously not to be safe but to be kidnapped. Because otherwise there wouldn't be a story. Of course you can't justify anything happening in the story with this, because everything that happens has to have some kind of logic behind it. Even if it was the story's own weird logic. As in a story has to be consistent. But some things still have to happen to pull the story along, otherwise there is no story.

Of course, if the things that have to happen for the story are also rationally motivated, it's a lot better. In this category goes all the thing that happen because they make sense. People act like people because they're people. They do what people would do in a situation. If you think about people in stories, they're surprisingly different from actual people. Think of any hero. Or any villain. Who is actually like that? Ok, I guess someone could be like some character. But it seems to me that a lot of characters are ideals or have some characteristics that are necessary for the story exaggerated from what a real person would be like. So maybe "they act like people isn't quite right". Maybe "they act the way they do because that's what they're like" is better. And then they might end up in situations and story lines that they weren't supposed to get into. Like apparently is happening to you. And apparently happened to the hypothetical author in the link I put on the comment on your last post. (You did read that, right? Dad thought it was hilarious.)

Then there's the fourth kind of motive: inter-textual. This stuff in the movie that somehow gives the watcher hints about things in the movie, but that you have to know to understand them. The example the book used was that in westerns good guys always have white hats and bad guys have black hats. I don't know if it's true or not. But basically they're that kind of things that repeat from story to story that don't have any significance to someone who doesn't know it, but if you've seen enough movies, you can clearly see from the very beginning who the hero and villain are. Because of the color of the hats. Or something else like that. Of course all these things don't apply to all movies. But they are apparently pretty consistent within a genre, for example.

Ok, this wasn't quite as long a thing as I thought it would be.
The biggest reason I'm thinking about this is because I've had a quite big problem with this in my thing. Because the whole point of the story is there are werewolves and then the village practically kills itself trying to get rid of them. And "because this has to happen for the story" just isn't a good enough a reason for them to kill each other on pretty much a hunch about who the wolf is.
I think I may have solved that problem today, though. Maybe I can get back to writing some time soon now that I may have solved the biggest problem in the motives in that book.

Ok, I'll hear from you again on Friday.

~matu