The Magic of Three

Okay, for the personal touch, this is my cat Willow, wearing her white bib at the cottage.

How many of you remember reading a story by Ray Bradbury named A Sound of Thunder?

It’s the classic sci-fi story about a time-traveler who visits a site in the ancient past, steps on a butterfly, and returns to find his own world utterly, irretrievably changed.

I can still remember the frisson that story gave me—the excitement of the idea that the fate of all things in the world rested somehow on the nature of their connection to each other.

In the early years of my writing career, I struggled to  make successful connections among the many elements of my stories. 

Why was I struggling?  Because I was thinking about story and characters in a literary way, a “straight line” way—the way print goes across a page, one element after another.  HERO— INCITING INCIDENT— GOAL— RISING ACTION— etc., etc.

Even worse, I just assumed that drama consisted mainly of “conflict” between two entities: Protagonist and Antagonist, Hero and Villain.  After much frustration with scripts that didn’t really work, I started to analyze movies and how they worked dramatically. 

What was it about the nature of movie stories that made them appeal so strongly to the audience?
I read a lot of scripts, I dissected a lot of plots, but the answer came from my study of movie posters – the ubiquitous “one-sheets.”

Again and again, posters for movies typically feature two major characters.  And neither of them is the Villain.

In fact – the typical movie story centers on a personal relationship between two characters, one of whom is the Hero.  I didn’t know what to call the other one except that I knew it was the “second most important character.”

I decided to name this character the BONDING CHARACTER.  And then, after closer examination, I learned four things about the audience’s response to the Bonding Character that truly surprised me:
The audience invests its positive emotion in the relationship between the Bonding Character and the Hero.

During the movie, the audience tracks this relationship and yearns for the Hero to “get together” with the Bonding Character in some way.

The audience realizes that the Bonding Character is very unlike the Hero, but it expects the Hero to use the Bonding Character’s qualities to help defeat the villain (think of Rachel Lapp’s pacifism in Witness, and how the Hero, John Book, uses it to defeat Schaefer, the crooked cop).

The audience expects the Bonding Character (not the villain) to have the second largest amount of screen time.

Perhaps my “trick” of creating a triangle of characters was some kind of intuitive recognition that movies need a complement of three major characters in order to work.  So, the magic of three – Hero, Bonding Character, and Villain.

I thought of Bradbury’s butterfly.  Such a tiny creature, but its connection to every other living thing was so significant that changing its death changed the whole development of the planet.

Maybe the connection of these three main characters to each other in a screenplay might be just as significant to a movie as the connection of the butterfly was to the future of the world

[Next blog]  The Right Connections