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When I was a kid we often spent summers with my aunt in New Jersey. A schoolteacher, she was home and available to watch us when we were out of school, while my single mom stayed back in Georgia to work.
And one summer she took us to see Jaws.
If you weren’t around when that movie was released, it’s hard to understand what a phenomenon it was. It was the first real summer blockbuster, a ubiquitous cultural touchstone, and it set the stage for decades of Big Event Movies.
It also might be hard to understand why my aunt would let us kids—ridiculously young at the time for a terrifying movie about a killer shark—see it, but she was “the fun aunt,” the one who did all kinds of things with us that maybe our mom wouldn’t necessarily have endorsed.
And remember we were the capable Gen Xers, the latchkey kids who—from an age unthinkably young now—habitually let ourselves into the house after school and went about our homework and chores and leisure activities quite ably until our parents got home from work. The ones who were released into the wild after dinner to go find entertainment with the other neighborhood kids and spent hours free-roaming the neighborhood and the woods surrounding it, or walking the shoulder of the surface streets down to the local shops and arcade and theaters, or just playing loosely organized games of kick-the-can or touch football and hide-and-seek somewhere in the area—our parents didn’t know where from day to day; no cell phones, remember—and instructed to “be back by dark.”
We were independent kids, mature for our ages—so what was one terrifying little monster movie?
But oh, terrifying that sucker was. I made my aunt sleep with me that night, and when she took us to the Jersey shore later that summer, did this little water baby get into the ocean?
No. Hell, no, I did not.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time (or we’ve ever met or spoken), you already know how much I love analyzing story—how much I think it can teach authors about their own writing in a far deeper, more granular, and immediate way than any amount of studying craft you could ever do.
Learn more: “How to Train Your Editor Brain”
So it’s no surprise that I adored this recent New York Times article (gift link so you can access) that nerdily breaks down the underlying story formula of Jaws, showing how it underlies countless other films in a similar genre.
The formula the article identifies has nine components:
A creature in a remote location attacks an initial victim. A reluctant hero challenges local authorities and is joined by experts. Ultimately a sacrifice leads to a final confrontation and the creature’s defeat/death.
But if you know me or my work, you likely also know that I eschew “rules” in writing—so much so that I always use the word in quotes—and exhort against writing to some external writing dogma or system.
So why am I so delighted with this article about how one trailblazing film set the formula behind so many subsequent blockbuster movies? Why am I urging you not only to read it, but to consider how its principles may apply to your own writing and stories?
The Familiar Formula of Jaws
While I loved the article, I was also amused that the “trend-setting” Jaws storyline it cites isn’t really breaking new ground. Here’s a truncated summary of basic story structure in general:
A protagonist encounters a problem or challenge and is compelled to grapple with it, but meets with obstacles. The protag(s) solicit or are offered support and assistance from other characters and move closer to the goal of their quest, but meet with setbacks, at least one of which seems to demand more than the hero has to offer. But they persevere in one final heroic effort before finally succeeding.
At its core, Jaws is just riffing on classic story structure, using the familiar basic building blocks of effective story. The creature is the problem/challenge. Adding a remote location ups the suspense because Our Heroes have fewer allies and resources (“In space, no one can hear you scream”). The initial victim establishes the stakes.
The protagonist—our hero—being reluctant increases tension and conflict, and sets up the point A of the character arc: how the character is stuck at the beginning of the story. Conflicts with local authorities provide more obstacles to the character’s goal; the experts—secondary characters—are the protags’ essential sidekicks or sounding board or mirror characters. The sacrifice is the dark moment/all-is-lost moment; the final confrontation is the climax; and the death/defeat of the creature is the resolution.
That’s just story. Jaws found an original way to spin the basic “formula” in a way that felt fresh and exciting, but the structure of the film conforms pretty closely to classic principles of story delineated by everyone from Aeschylus to Joseph Campbell to Lisa Cron.
How Can Formula Serve Your Stories?
Most creatives don’t set out to regurgitate remade versions of stories that have been told before. We want to boldly go where no storyteller has gone before, create utterly original tales, characters, and perhaps even story structure no reader has ever seen.
Whether that’s even a possibility is one debate, considering the prominent role storytelling has played in societies throughout the vast reach of human history. Even the Old Testament advises that there is nothing new under the sun.
But even if we could (and I have seen authors try, an experimentation I applaud), the more pertinent question is whether these totally groundbreaking storytelling methods are effective: meaning do they engage readers, invest them in the tale, satisfy whatever itch brought them to seek out story in the first place?
I knew an author many years ago who had written a manuscript with a cephalopod protagonist, but it failed to engage any of the readers of our large critique group on a deep level because she insisted that octopi have no emotional, spiritual, or metaphysical longings or passions, and thus she was being accurate to the species.
That may be true (but honestly…can we know that?), but without some kind of subjective inner life and reactions beyond just sensory stimuli, human readers—to our current knowledge this author’s only feasible audience—are unlikely to feel invested in or identify with a psychic dead zone of a protagonist.
And yet decades later, Shelby Van Pelt released Remarkably Bright Creatures, a novel with an octopus protagonist that became a New York Times bestseller not once, but twice.
Van Pelt’s novel isn’t “the exception that proves the rule” (a saying I have never understood), though; analyze it and you quickly identify all the key elements of classic story structure we looked at above:
Marcellus the octopus’s problem is that he understands he’ll soon die in captivity in his tank at an aquarium, where he is kept alone and isolated from his kind and at the mercy of his human keepers (conflict and obstacles that set up his character arc). He longs for freedom (goal) before he reaches the end of his lifespan (stakes and suspense—the ticking clock) and develops a relationship with two employees of the aquarium (secondary characters/allies). When trying to help one of them, Marcellus is found out of his tank on the floor, near death—the black moment—until she valiantly carries him out to the pier (climax) and he returns at last to the sea (resolution).
In other words…it adheres to the classic story formula, which I’d argue is no small part of why it succeeded where the other author’s octopus story didn’t. Readers knew what Marcellus wanted, why it mattered, and it’s what made us care about him and his quest and root for him to succeed.
But Don’t Just Write to Formula
That doesn’t mean I recommend you write formulaic stories, though. In fact, I beg you not to—much of my work as an editor is helping authors avoid the trap of their stories seeming formulaic or predictable or overfamiliar.
Jaws succeeded, among other reasons, because it found a fresh spin on basic story structure, but most of the copycat films that came after it that treated Spielberg’s story as simply a plug-and-play formula (change shark to piranha! Or grizzlies! Or gators!) didn’t pack nearly the punch of Jaws, nor have its success.
And the ones that did were more than just carbon copies. They put their own fresh spin on the formula that made the stories feel unique: Alien moved the remote location to space and made the reluctant hero a kick-ass woman left alone with the monster on a deserted spaceship at a time when most movie action heroes were male. Twister made the monster deadly tornadoes; Jurassic Park made them resurrected dinosaurs—both fresh takes that injected just enough originality to grab audiences, even if these movies, too, were adhering to Spielberg’s riff on classic story formula.
Just like clichés become clichés because they’re largely based in common truths, formulas become formulas because they work. And lest we creatives get on our high horse about forging wholly original paths, consider how formula underlies every other single creative effort.
Cake requires flour, sweetener, a binding agent, a fat, a leavening agent, and flavoring, but bakers are free to improvise within that basic formula. Chef Samin Nosrat says that the most effective salads incorporate salt, fat, acid, umami, and crunch—but think of the vast array of salads that can be assembled with riffs on that formula…or soups from the basic formula of a base, main ingredients, and seasoning.
You can’t create something “new” without understanding the elements and theories and systems that underlie your art form. We are all standing on the shoulders of those who came before us.
Countless songs are based on a formula of common chord progressions; dancers recombine the formula of body, energy, space, and time; artists recombine the seven elements of art—line, shape, form, space, value, color, and texture—to create seemingly infinite variations on the formula.
Formula isn’t a copout or a dirty word for artists; it’s our foundation. It’s why every writing teacher worth their salt will advise authors to learn the “rules” before they break them: You can’t create something “new” without understanding the elements and theories and systems that underlie your art form. We are all standing on the shoulders of those who came before us.
But we can use that platform to leap out in new directions. We can offer our own style, our own spin, our fresh takes…our voice. Those are subjective additions that make these tried-and-true basic story elements come together in a form uniquely ours—and that’s what makes your stories stand out.
Learn more: Download my free Story Sketch Template for an assist in identifying the key elements of classic story formula in setting up your own stories
Over to you, authors. How do you feel about story “formulas”? How do you balance the foundation of incorporating key elements that make successful story work with improvising on the classic “formulas” to create your own unique stories so you aren’t simply creating tired, lifeless copycats? Or…tell me your Jaws stories if you have any. 😊 I think it made an indelible mark on a whole generation of kids.
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9 Comments. Leave new
Loved, loved, loved Jaws! And dark water still scares me, even if it’s an indoor, chlorinated pool (talk about visceral!)
As a Lisa Cron fan, I’m in love with story, and I don’t have anywhere near the imagination to create a brand spanking new one. But the good news is, even given that, mine are different than any other one. So are yours.
Isn’t that a wonderful thing? How lucky are we to get to do that?
I am weirdly okay in lake water (unless there are gators), but the ocean still always makes me feel weirdly vulnerable, like a human teabag (even though I LOVE IT). A friend just sent photos of a shark in the shallows of a beach where we were vacationing together last week and it was pretty freaky!
Love your positive outlook, Laura–we could all use a dose of that, and a reminder of what a gift and privilege it is to get to invent our own stories and spins on them. Thanks!
I go for hikes, tempting bears and mountain lions (yes, we have both), but I DO NOT go in the ocean, not since seeing Jaws in my early teens on Long Island. That was it for me. I have feet. I belong on land. Matter settled. 🤣
I follow classic structure with, on the surface, common basic elements. Just because copycat houses line a street doesn’t mean they all look the same on the inside. Original stories with new ideas are what matter.
I’m with you–sharks are the scariest. (Although I don’t know…bears and mountain lions are right up there. And gators.) That said, I’ll still swim in the ocean…but not nearly as blithely or deep as I used to. (But the other day a friend sent photos of a shark swimming in the shallowest of surf at a beach where we were vacationing two weeks ago…AGH! A beach where I have been out there swimming when fins were spotted just yards away.)
Great analogy about houses–I think we do need to strive for originality and making our stories unique and our own, but there’s a certain amount of commonality that seems inevitable to me–and even largely desirable. Thanks, Christina.
I’m with Laura Drake! I’m weirdly obsessed. If it’s on, no matter how late, I’ll watch it all, like some part of my brain doesn’t know how it ends.
Closed environment stories (The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, Misery) are my favorites, but I think ‘JAWS’ is subconsciously scarier because the places in the other stories aren’t EVERYWHERE like WATER! Thanks, Spielberg.
To this day, I hate bridges that cross any body of water potentially large enough to hold a shark. Twisting a closed environment into something new sounds fun. Trying is the fun part, or we wouldn’t write, right?
Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I wanna go to bed . . .
That’s funny–like a train wreck. 🙂 I STILL have trouble watching Jaws, as a grown-ass woman.
Yeah, the closed environment is such a potent element of scary stories–as is that aspect of the familiar becoming dangerous or terrifying, like The Shining, or for that matter Jaws: So many of us regard the beach as a relaxing, welcoming, soothing place, so the idea of that nasty-ass killer out there, just under the surface…it’s chilling. There’s well-known lore about the film that the shark itself is so rarely seen because the animatronic version looked so phony, so Spielberg relied on the suspense of that under-the-surface unknown and unseen that I think is such a huge part of why the movie is so terrifying. I always think finding ways to overcome limitations like that can yield the most creative of results! Thanks for the comment, Robin.
Great post. Thank you for this. Your posts always cause me to think about this stuff.
I, too, violently resent the idea that there are rules for writers. Readers don’t have to obey rules, and readers don’t, so why should writers?
Readers do have expectations. For example: that blind but adorable couple will finally realize they belong together; that mystery will be solved, all will be revealed, and the villain(s) will get what they deserve; that hero will reach his/her goal at the end of his/her challenging quest.
What guides authors are principles, not rules: things like conflict, goals, and stakes. If there weren’t conflict, the story’d be over already; if there weren’t goals, there’d be nothing to strive for, no action; if there weren’t stakes, none of it would matter; and if the inciting moment, rising action, turning point, climax, and resolution weren’t chosen carefully and presented in an interesting way, why would anybody turn the page?
The questions I ask beta readers are: Are you (still) engaged? Do you care enough to turn the page? Why? Why not? If not, where’d I lose you? What should’ve happened? At the end, are you satisfied—are you glad you had this experience?
It’s more like a puzzle than an equation or formula. I have all these pieces to work with; now I have to pick the ones I think will serve my story best, and put ’em together—in the way that only I can. It’s that simple.
But, (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) simple doesn’t mean easy.
BTW: The exception that proves the rule didn’t make any sense to me either, but it turns out that, at the time that saying was invented, the word proves didn’t mean what it means today, it meant tests (challenges the rule.)
It still doesn’t make any sense, but now I know why.
I love this comment, Bob! You’ve pretty much described not only your own storytelling process, but my approach to editing. It’s not cookie-cutter–you can’t evaluate a story based on a specific template. You have to consider each one individually, not for how well it conforms to “formula” or “rules,” but by how effective it is, as you say: how well it engages the reader and keeps them hooked, how satisfying the story is to readers. And your beta reader questions mirror ones I ask myself as I’m editing–and recommend authors ask their own beta readers and crit partners to elicit useful, actionable feedback. (I even created a downloadable template authors can customize and offer to their readers to help do that.)
I wholeheartedly agree with you that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with writing or storytelling “rules,” but yes, we always need to consider reader expectations, reactions, and as you say, story principles. As Lisa Cron ably points out, these aren’t random: They are based on the way our brains work and what makes story most impactful and effective to us. (It’s the same kind of theories that underlie advertising: What grabs people’s attention and spurs them to action?)
No, you’re right…simple doesn’t mean easy. Writing and storytelling craft are enormously complex. I’ve been working at it for decades and still learn more pretty much every day.
And hey, thanks for clearing up the etymology of that phrase! That makes more sense. (I always love hearing word/phrase origins.)
Just for the fun of it, I’m gonna send you my beta reader letter and questions!