Meaning Out of Madness

How to Save Your Story With a Central Message and Moral Argument

It’s the middle of summer and that latest blockbuster tentpole movie is playing at your local theater.  You’re excited.  Your friends are excited.  The whole world is excited.  You know it’s gonna be a hit.  But then you see it and you’re like, “Eh.  It was okay.”  The cast was great, it had amazing special effects, cinematography, action; the works.  Yet, you left that theater feeling like you went to a buffet and consumed flavored air.  It felt... empty.

Why is this a common experience with these kinds of big-budget movies?  I could go on a long-winded diatribe about the movie industry and how their priorities have shifted more towards profits over great storytelling, but that’s not what this article is about nor is it gonna do you any good to get all huffy over well-moneyed production companies making plastic summer movies that suck.  That energy should be devoted to learning how to make films that are original because Hollywood isn’t going to change, so it truly is up to you to make that change. And the best way to do it is to master the craft and develop great movies independent of Hollywood.

The bad news is that it’s hard to do, especially the writing part.  But the good news is, it’s not impossible. If you consider what I’m about to unpack, you can virtually turn any bad idea into a good story with enough experience and elbow grease.  It’s two simple little elements, but very important:  Your central message and the moral conversation surrounding your central message.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  To truly appreciate and understand why it’s even worth developing these things for your story, I think it’s important to take a moment and explain why we engage in creative writing in the first place. 

The Purpose of Stories

I used to think that creative writing was just something we did to express ourselves and entertain others.  But after doing it for eight years, I’ve come to find that it’s a lot more than that.  While storytelling is entertaining, that value stems from the satisfaction we get from watching something that can help us make better sense of ourselves and the World around us.  Even when we watch predictable movies, if they’re great, we feel a sense of completeness because every great movie simulates the experience of discovery and learning in some capacity.

It’s a similar experience we have when we put in a lot of hard work to get to that “Eureka” moment; when the pieces all come together and suddenly what you were learning about makes total sense.  It’s a feeling of accomplishment and a sense of wholeness with one’s self.  

That’s what movies simulate for us and why we crave it so much.  It’s a great feeling and gets people to sit down for an hour and a half, so the industry’s modus operandi is creating stories whose very structure makes you feel this way.  And when a movie can do this well, it’s generally praised highly. 

But when a movie does this too predictably, even if it’s effective at creating the simulated experience, it’s not praised as highly as it would have been had it been far less predictable.  So the Adam Sandler movies will rake in the bucks because they’re well-crafted, but movies like Fight Club or Parasite will be remembered by the people who’ve seen it like Citizen Kane because they’re well-crafted and unpredictable movies, which makes the experience more unique and memorable. 

This is why your central message and moral conversation are so fundamental, as they help you supplant that sense of discovery and learning into your stories.  So let's take a quick dive into these two concepts to really understand what I mean.  Now, this is going to be a little confusing and at times it will feel completely unrelated to writing, so to better understand what I’m about to explain, cement this point into your head.  

The anatomy of a story and its physiology boils down to two broad components.  There are the physical things, that are happening and being said (the anatomy), and then there is the meaning or significance behind those actions and words, which are all related to one another (the physiology).  So to make good choices, you need to know the meaning of the story and how it connects to the physical things happening on page.  Makes sense?  Okay, now let's go down the rabbit hole. 

What is a Central Message?

This is a household term that everyone in and outside of writing has heard of, but it's funny because it’s also one of the most misunderstood terms.  A lot of people seem to think that a central message is a one-sentence statement of what your story is about.  That’s a logline, which is also important to understand, but before you even learn about loglines you need to know what a central message is because that shapes your logline and pretty much every other choice you make when writing your story.

A central message is a one-sentence statement that defines the story’s meaning behind the choices made. It is not a statement that describes the story. Rather, it’s a statement expressing an arguable truth within the story. 

So, let's say you want to write a meaningful, quirky comedy about Jack Black forming a psychological condition where every ugly girl he sees actually looks beautiful to him. Give it a cute title like Shallow Hal, and bingo, you've got a hit story, right?

It’s a good starting point, but if you were to begin writing this now and you didn’t know what you were doing you would likely end up creating a much flatter version of the story, not because you’re uncreative or talentless, but because new writers fail to realize that all of the choices they make should align consistently to their central message.  If you fail to do this, then your story fails to have meaning and depth, and even a dumb quirky comedy from the early 2000s needs that to get people to buy the movie.  There are exceptions to this, but trust me when I say that most of those movies are never made.

So to lay out a solid overarching story foundation to build on, writers will start with a central message, whether they write it down or simply think about it while writing a story.  A pro working on an idea like Shallow Hal might start with the plot's gist and a single central message statement to weave in such as, “Love comes from within.” A nice little statement, sure, but if you read carefully, it’s a statement that can be argued and unpacked.  Does love come from within or are there other factors?  Maybe love comes from favors or how much you depend on someone.  Maybe it’s beauty.  Perhaps love is an illusion that doesn’t come from anywhere.

Okay, so how is any of this related to writing stories?  Well, think about it. On the page, you’re given total freedom to create whatever you want, but with that freedom, you’re also plagued by an infinite number of good and bad choices that you, as the writer, must make, and you must choose wisely because the wrong choices mean that you’ll be constructively criticized by your friends and vehemently ridiculed by strangers. But worse, you won’t be a successful writer, or at least the chances will be slim.

This is why starting with a central message is so important. It helps you distill the infinite number of choices down to a manageable amount.  It’s like your compass to help you navigate all the creative possibilities.

Your central message grounds you into a sandbox; a sandbox that’s still vast and deep, but one that shields you from the madness of too many options.  With a central message, you can make your story choices much more easily such as your character’s morning routines or what they do for a living.  

That’s why Hal, the main character in Shallow Hal, is a fat showboat because it exposes the irony that relates to the central message, “Love comes from within”.  We would expect a fat guy to see love from within, but it turns out at the beginning of the movie he’s the complete opposite, which makes him hypocritical. So just that tiny central message statement alone combined with the fact that it’s a comedy allows you, as a writer, to reach an interesting choice like that.  

If the writer blindly went into it without considering these things, then it's entirely possible Hal would have ended up being a regular average Joe.  Sure, you can still technically write a story with this character, but without that central message to guide you to the optimal choices, you’re liable to create a flat story with flat characters who don’t learn anything or cause the audience to learn anything.  Your story will lack depth and meaning, so you better hope your movie plot is fascinating enough for your audience to ignore this fundamental mistake.

Developing a central message concurrently with your logline or general story idea is a great way to get your brain in the right creative ballpark to make those powerful decisions for your characters, dialogue, plot, etc. But that’s only a part of the equation. Great stories also indirectly express alternative views that challenge the central message.

Moral Conversation

Imagine you’re at a bar with your friends and one of them starts the conversation with, “This table is brown.”  Aside from the fact that it’s a weird statement, no one would know how to respond or even argue against it.  They would awkwardly agree and move on.  Now imagine instead of starting the conversation with that, they start with a story about how they just landed their dream job before ending with the proclamation that all of us are the masters of our destiny.

That’s an interesting conversation especially since now everyone else can go around and express their opinion about the fundamental point he’s making, which is that we are the masters of our destiny.  Perhaps someone at that table will agree, but not everyone.  Some might believe in fate.  Others may believe neither and think it’s all about chance with some elbow grease.  Either way, a conversation has now formed and the central argument within that conversation is whether or not we are the masters of our destiny.

This kind of discussion is reflected in how we structure the meaning of great stories, which is why I like to explore my central message by writing out a moral conversation. A moral conversation is a fancy way to describe this little exercise I like to do when fleshing out my story. It’s simple. Open up a Word doc and start writing what your main character philosophically believes about the world and how one should live. Then develop the strongest counterpoint to that belief (this is what the antagonist believes). Finally, with all this information on the page, create a synthesis between the two arguments. The synthesis is your central message or central point.  

This sounds like an academic paper more than fictional writing. But if you think about it, a fictional story is structured similarly.  You have a protagonist who embodies an outlook on life. They’re propelled into a journey confronting obstacles and opponents who embody the opposite outlook, which challenges the main character’s belief. By the end of the story, they form a new perspective, which is the synthesis between their original outlook on life and the antagonist’s outlook.

So developing your moral conversation is a way to map out the meaning behind your story.  Your central message is your “North Star” for every decision and the moral conversation is an extrapolation of that, revealing arguments that support or fail to support the central message. If you can establish all of these things before starting, you can create with intent because you understand exactly why you made your choices.

For instance, maybe your main character is trying hard to enjoy their day with someone, and while grabbing ice cream, they accidentally drop a cone.  The person they are with tells them it’s okay, but the other person keeps insisting on buying another ice cream, eventually yelling, “I just wanna have a good day!  Okay?”

The surficial reason for their explosion might have been due to the loss of a loved one. Perhaps they’re in turmoil, grieving.  That’s the cause-and-effect reason.  But let's say your central message is, “You can’t run away from your problems.”  The deeper reason behind their outburst then could reflect their propensity for always running away from their problems. They lost someone and now they’re trying to ignore it by having a good day. In short, this action suggests that they are running away from their problems.

That’s really what we mean by creating meaningful choices also known as subtext.  These decisions aren’t simply made due to cause-and-effect events within the story.  They’re choices based on a deeper meaning related to your central message, and establishing a moral conversation allows you to get a better sense of the obstacles and other characters that you can create within your plot, which will ideally strengthen the story’s meaning.     

Conclusion

Great stories are about creating allegories to express an arguable truth about life and the counterargument to that truth.  That’s why taking the time to flesh out your central message and moral conversation is so useful. A central message can give you a philosophical realm to craft your story and a moral conversation can help you structure that realm.  That’s your hidden skeletal structure behind the story.  Everything else is the representational elements used to indirectly express that hidden structure, such as how you design your characters, their relationships, the plot structure, style, tone, pace, etc.  

We often focus our energy on those things more than we do on the underlying reasons behind the choices we make to build those things, and that’s why so many people think writing is impossible to do.  They’ll plot their stories, design their characters, and structure their script appropriately.  But at the end of the day without a strong central message and a great understanding of their moral conversation, they’ll create flat stories that fail to move an audience.

It’s just like a philosophical paper only instead of using heady words, you’re using action, dialogue, and characters.  You’re using entertainment to express philosophy, which is very beautiful and sacred because philosophy is what actually shapes the way we live, the way we interact with others, and even the way we govern ourselves and conduct science.  But most people don’t have the time or patience to sit around and read heavy philosophy books.  So using mainstream entertainment to express these deep questions and assumptions can be a transformative experience for millions, reshaping the world for better and for worse.

It’s easy to cast a writer as unimportant and only for entertainment.  Sure, we’re not as important as doctors, but I’ll put it to you like this.  Even if we fell back into the Stone Age, we would still see people sitting around campfires telling stories because no matter what, even if we lost everything, we would still want to discover and learn.  We would still desire to make meaning out of the World because the alternative to not knowing is...Well, it’s madness.

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Story Prism, LLC

https://www.storyprism.io/