Recently, a friend of mine pointed me to a website called “Comics Should Be Good.” I was a comic book fan back in an earlier incarnation, and despite the fact that I’ve not bought any new comics in about 10 years, I can still spit out comic book trivia with the best of them.

In a recent article linked from the site, John Seavey introduced the concept of a “storytelling engine.” I’ll try to break down the idea as best as I can.

In short, the best comics (and, by extension, the best stories) have components which are so strong that they become “storytelling engines”: the concept of the comic/TV show/book series/movie franchise/fanfiction is so strong, that it acts as a perpetual motion machine. One can derive a theoretically infinite set of stories from the premises alone.

As an illustration, Seavey points to two of the longest running comics — Superman and Batman. (Insert Marvel titles if you feel slighted.) Each of these ideas can be encapsulated by a “status quo” — a one-sentence summing up of the character, so simple that a new reader can say “I get it!” For Superman, the “status quo” would be “last survivor of an alien planet fights crime with his amazing powers.” For Batman, it would be “obsessed avenger devotes his mind and body to eradicating all forms of evil.”

From the “status quo,” you basically say everything that’s important about the character. If someone living on a desert island had never seen Superman before, but you were about to give them a comic or show them Superman: The Movie, the status quo adequately prepares them for what they are about to see. If you understand the status quo, you understand the character.

From that point, you further illustrate the premise by giving the character’s motivations and backstory. This helps one better understand the behavior of the character beyond the initial premise.

The next step is to add the supporting cast. Who does the character know? Who knows the character? What people have the most interaction with the characters?

Next, you need the setting: the immediate world which influences the character, the environment, the surroundings. If Superman were using his powers in a post-apocalyptic world, it would be a major change from Metropolis and the Daily Planet.

Following that, one mentions the antagonists: the characters whose wants and desires are opposed to the wants and the desires of the character.

And last but not least: the tone of the stories. In what style will these tales be told? The style of the Batman TV series was “campy humor”; the style of the O’Neill/Aparo Batman of the 1970s was “gritty urban detective story.” The exact same character, background, and antagonists, but two completely different spins.

For an example, let’s examine our heroine. Suppose I wished to explain Daria to someone who had never seen it before, but I had a limited amount of time. This is what I would write:

Name of show: Daria

Status quo: “Cynical and sarcastic girl exposes the hypocrisies, major and minor, of the world about her.”

Main character: (motivations and backstory)
“High school girl.”
“Intellectual.”
“Unpopular.”
“Doesn’t follow fashion, good looking but plain in appearance.”
“Loner, keeps to herself.”
“Forms friendships rarely.”
“Suspicious of authority.”
“Not ‘into’ boys, but not gay.”

Supporting cast:
Jane, her artistic and quirky friend.
Quinn, her fashion-obsessed sister.
Helen, her workaholic mother.
Jake, her clueless father.
Ms. Li, the order-obsessed principal of Lawndale High.
Other characters embodying stereotypical teachers and students.

Setting:
Lawndale High School.
Well off, mostly white suburbia.

Antagonists:
Ms. Li
Quinn
Helen

Tone:
Sarcastic humor with occasional farcical humor and melodrama.

I make this claim: If you know the above information, you know everything important there is to know about Daria. No Daria episode should ever surprise you if you haven’t seen it, providing you know the above.

Furthermore, change the above, and you change Daria into something entirely different. You’re not going to see Daria run for class president, unless it’s to pull off some cynical scam. Daria is never going to worry about who her date to the prom will be. And if Daria is given a gift horse, she’s going to look down its throat with a laryngoscope.

So what was the point of this pedantic exercise? Just the following: Some shows/concepts make great storytelling engines, and others don’t. The flaws in a premise can be examined by looking at each individual element, and asking, “Do these elements help me tell stories, or keep me from telling stories?”

Seavey’s point was that the reason Superman and Batman have lasted for so long is that the premises and backgrounds and characters provide for a virtually infinite amount of stories to tell. No matter how pressed Mort Weisinger might have been in coming up with a story for Superman, he could always follow Ayn Rand’s advice and “check [his] premises” — there would be something in the premise, background, or tone that would cause a story to coalesce out of the ether and help Weisinger meet his deadline.

Let’s do an exercise with Daria. Which elements help tell stories and which elements hinder the telling of stories?

The premise is strong. It’s almost as if the character is Groucho Marx in the form of a 1990s high school girl. The stories of authority vs. cynicism are almost limitless.

High school girl? Okay, a bit limiting in stories, but there’s a wealth of stories that can be told with an underaged protagonist.

“Intellectual” helps. The main character can be involved in very complex situations. “Suspicious of authority”? Provides some conflict, maybe some melodrama.

The supporting cast looks good. Characters rich in variety, and much potential for conflicting wants and desires. And if you’re a comedy writer, you should have no problem unless you don’t like sarcasm or sharp humor.

Indeed, most of the Season One and Season Two stories were “clash with authority” stories. Daria and her friend Jane would clash with authorities of various types: Quinn, the “popularity authority”; Ms. Li, the “school authority”; and Helen, the “parental authority.” Those authorities would try to put Daria in some kind of social straitjacket, but Daria’s sharp wit would help her even the odds and leave the schemes of the authorities in ruins.

However, some of these premises are a bit limiting. “Unpopular.” “Loner.” “Keeps to herself.” Those ideas are story-killers. This means that Daria doesn’t seek out conflict, but she also doesn’t seek the spotlight. Thus, some sort of contrivance has to be used to get Daria to be involved into a situation she’d naturally avoid.

This resulted in a set of “fish in barrel” episodes. Daria was less Groucho and more Bugs Bunny — wanting to be left alone to read, but Yosemite Sam/Quinn/Helen/Mr. O’Neill comes along and forces her into an unhappy situation. “You know, this means war,” mutters Daria, and after Daria works her sarcastic magic everything is in ruins.

The problem for the show, however, is that Bugs Bunny isn’t supposed to be believable, and cartoons can just “reset” reality for the next episode. With Daria, this ended up with a set of wonderful, very funny episodes, but by the start of the third season, monotony had set in.

The series couldn’t survive unless some of the premises were challenged, particularly the part about being a “loner” who is “unpopular with boys.” Eichler and company decided, therefore, to give Daria a boyfriend — Jane’s boyfriend, Tom. This set up one of the best kinds of conflict — noble character vs. noble character — but at the end of it, Daria and Tom were now paired up.

The Season One and Season Two gold mine had been tapped out. With Season Five, Daria became a relationship comedy to some small degree, and Season Five might have been the least satisfying of seasons. A Daria unsure of herself and unsure of what she wanted in a relationship was in direct opposition to the Status Quo of the character: a cynic who knew, at least, the price of everything, if not the value. And face it: high school romances are worth about 25 cents in cynical currency.

For Daria to dither and dather about her relationship with Tom was very un-Daria-like, and the series never resolved the contradiction between its former Status Quo and the new motivations of its main character. No wonder she ended up in a cardboard box on the front lawn, staring out at the world. When she got rid of Tom, there was a sigh of relief among some fans, if only that the contradiction had been resolved.

Unfortunately, there were no new ideas: Daria was, in essence, out of stories and ended at just the right time. I suspect a Season Six would have been a disaster.

Now a thought exercise for fan-fiction writers. Suppose you had been asked to write a series with the Status Quo and premises above. You can flesh out the rest of the Daria universe any way you like. My question is, how many stories can you get with the premises above? Infinitely many? Or just 24 good ones? (Remember, you’re not allowed to change or alter the premises.)

Labels: Writing