Profluency: the momentum of stories
In part one of this topic, I defined profluency as a sense of forward momentum that all stories need. Today I want to clarify exactly what it is that fuels that momentum, driving our need to see the story’s conflicts resolved. This anticipation is something that needs to be infused into a film as early as possible. In the best cases, anticipation begins before the movie begins - just from the poster! Here’s how.
Even if you’ve never seen this blockbuster, you can probably imagine what the main conflict of the story is going to be just from a well-designed poster that encapsulates “the problem.”
Launching a story into motion
The most common way to kick a story into gear is to confront the protagonist with a seemingly insurmountable problem (preferably embodied by a formidable antagonist) or a challenging goal. Our curiosity to see them meet this challenge hinges not just on how difficult it is, but how ill-suited the protagonist seems as a candidate for success given their beliefs, awareness, and skills.
But here’s the funny thing: we don’t need to care about what they care about - their external goal. What fuels stories is the internal change required for a protagonist to get what they need, which is rarely the same as what they want. A story worth watching forces them to confront their deepest flaw. Overcoming it is what we really come to stories to see. It isn’t just entertaining; it provides the kind of hope and wisdom we can bring to our own lives and struggles.
Here are examples of a protagonist’s dilemma from three well-known movies (whose titles you can try to guess - answers are at the bottom):
An unemployed, uneducated single mother hits rock bottom when she’s injured in a car accident and wants quick compensation to pay her bills.
A young upper-class socialite has promised to marry a wealthy, controlling man she doesn’t love in order to pay her family’s debts. When she falls in love with a homeless, penniless artist, she has to choose not just between two suitors and loyalties to her mother versus herself, but between completely opposite ways of life; lovelessness but financial security vs. love but financial uncertainty.
When a miserable man in a stale marriage is fired from his long-hated job, he abandons morals and convention to turn his life around and seduce a teenage girl with whom he’s appallingly obsessed.
Action versus drama
While the middle half of a movie typically follows a protagonist as they pursue their goal, no action is inherently dramatic. If the action doesn’t challenge a protagonist’s deepest illusions and reveal the true source of their suffering to them, it’s just business - story busy work. It’s not what they do that really matters; it’s why.
“Rain Man? You’re the Rain Man?” Charlie begins to realize what he was really deprived of when his brother Raymond was secreted away.
Here’s an example (spoilers!!): In the 1988 masterpiece Rain Man (screenplay by Barry Morrow and Ron Bass), we don’t care about what protagonist Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) cares about, which is wrangling his “fair share” of his father’s $3M inheritance away from his autistic brother in order to save his struggling exotic car business. While we understand the stress of his financial troubles, if the film was only about satisfying Charlie’s sense of entitlement with money, it would have left us unmoved, if not outright disgusted.
While kidnapping his brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) as a bargaining chip comprises the main action of the story, what drives the story forward is that we see what Charlie does not: while he wants money, what he needs is to care about someone other than himself (not to mention forgiving his father).
Discovering that his autistic brother is vulnerable and impossible to control initially aggravates Charlie and creates obstacles to traveling cross country. But the true purpose of the brother character is to challenge Charlie to be a nicer person, to give him a chance to recover his humanity. Having seen Charlie behave with staggering cruelty and selfishness in literally every scene of the story, it is initially impossible to imagine how he could ever change. But in his brother Raymond, Charlie is confronted with the first person he cannot simply bully into submission.
Things finally start to change just after the midpoint when Charlie realizes that a comforting figure from his childhood that he’d thought was imaginary was actually none other than his brother Raymond. Institutionalized after their mother died in fears that Raymond might inadvertently harm Charlie, who was still a toddler, Charlie realizes just how much Raymond cared about him and was traumatized by being banished from the family. His real loss was not money; it was missing the opportunity to have a relationship with his only brother.
What stories are really about
The action of stories is never what they’re really about. What affects us deeply is the transformation of someone who initially seems incapable of it. That difficult process of internal change is the real propellant of forward momentum, what makes it dramatic and provides a sense of urgency to see how things end - and is what gives a film a lasting impact on us.
To recap, there are two realizations that we have along with the protagonist:
What they want isn’t actually what they need.
They’re never going to get what they need unless they change something about themselves internally - their greatest flaw or most limiting belief.
This is dramatic because we know people don’t change easily - especially when it comes to something so big that it was the driving belief behind their personalities. We humans hate being wrong and will go to insane lengths to avoid admitting it. Even after we recognize that we’re on the wrong path, it takes time to regroup, to surrender a deeply held belief, and to come up with a new plan that’s more true to the person we’ve realized we really are. The ripple effects could change not just our plans but our relationships, our careers, and our way of viewing the world.
Profluency begins with a journey toward a difficult goal. But even the profluency has to change: a story has to accelerate toward the ending. The stakes have to be raised. The desired ending has to seem increasingly impossible. The closer the protagonist gets toward disaster, the more vividly their soul hangs in the balance, the more our hopes and fears for them escalate. As a result, our desire grows to see it all satisfactorily resolved.
If we could grab the movie and pull the ending toward us more quickly to relieve our anxiety, we might. It’s a fine line between building anticipation and exhausting our patience. But the amazing thing is that we love stories that take us for a good ride. Something about being given time to imagine the worst makes it that much more satisfying when the protagonist finally achieves a transformation that seemed utterly impossible.
In the end, we come to stories looking for hope that we too can find the courage to live according to our highest principles, to overcome tremendous difficulties with our souls intact, and to relieve some of our unnecessary (usually self-imposed) suffering.
Ironically, change is not only the engine of dramatic writing, but meaningful change in characters is what every good story is really about.