Transcript
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Welcome to lesson one of Writing with Hobbits. As you can see here we’re going to be talking about scene setting and the inciting incident. You may have seen this before. This is called Freytag’s Pyramid. This is a way of thinking about how a plot works. And I want to give you a little caution here. This is not a formula for how to write a story. But it is a helpful little visual to help us understand how stories move, how stories tend to move. But you can’t use this as a formula to say, “Okay, now I’ve got to move on from rising action to climax.” It’s not going to help you come up with story ideas very well. That’s not really what it’s for. But it is a way, as I said, to understand how stories move along typically. And also if you have written a story that’s not quite working, you can go back to Freytag’s Pyramid and maybe do some thinking. So over the course of this course, we’re going to be returning to Freytag’s Pyramid a few more times. But for this lesson, we’re only going to get about this far, okay, exposition and the inciting event. As you can see from Freytag’s pyramid, a story starts at one sort of horizontal line, one even, and I call it an equilibrium, and by moving through rising action to a climax and a falling action comes to a new equilibrium.
And so we’re going to be talking in this lesson about that first equilibrium in a story and how you establish a first equilibrium. And all I mean by equilibrium is kind of a sense of balance. You might think of this as, you know, here’s the first normal that the story starts with and it ends at a new normal. But in the middle we’re kind of, it’s all about a life that’s not normal, right? It’s about conflict and problem solving, which you might say is the normal case for human existence. But as you know from your own life, sometimes things feel kind of like they’re steady and sometimes they feel like they’re in turmoil. And so Freytag’s pyramid gives us a picture of that, right? Here, we start from a place of steadiness and evenness and then we have a time of turmoil and then we have a new period of steadiness, a new normal.
Okay, so you may have heard the term exposition before and exposition gets used in a lot of different ways. I would say a good working, let’s say a working synonym for exposition is just explanation, kind of explaining where we are, how we got here. Sometimes exposition is a matter of giving background to a reader. In storytelling exposition is a way of giving background. And sometimes exposition is a way of explaining some theory or idea that is important in a story. So you might have exposition in a bit of dialogue where two people are explaining. If you think about Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, when the professor explains some concepts, important ideas to Peter and Susan where he says in effect, he explains the logical status of Lucy’s disagreement, let’s call it, with Edmund. That’s exposition. That’s one kind of exposition. But another kind of exposition that we think about a lot is background which often happens at the beginning of a story, right? Sort of a scene setting. And scenes, When I speak of scene setting, I want you to think of it in two ways. One is the actual physical scene. Where are we? You know, what time period? What kind of characters are we looking at? What kind of world do we live in? That’s a kind of scene setting. And then there’s also the interior world of a character. Where does a character, how does a character think about the world and view the world? A lot of times we get that established very early in a story and that’s a kind of scene setting too. So we’re going to look at both of those kinds of scene setting in the first chapter of The Hobbit. So as I said exposition we are going to be looking at what is normal for Bilbo the Hobbit. And so these are the very first lines from the first chapter of The Hobbit. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit, not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.
It was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.” Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here. There’s a lot going on in this little beginning. of all, I mean there’s such a surprising little, I love the way it kind of throws us into this world, not even, well I don’t know, would you say we’re being introduced slowly into this world or are we kind of dropped into this world? Sometimes a story just starts with, it’s like you’re parachuted into a world and you don’t know what’s going on and that can be fun, right, where you don’t, there’s not much in the way of explanation. We’re just jumping right into the story, to the action. And sometimes there’s a lot of explanation. This, I think, leans toward the more explanation. But still, this is a little bit of a surprising start, isn’t it? “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Doesn’t explain what a hobbit is. Just says he lives in a hole. So what is a hobbit? We don’t know yet, right? We just get this description of the hole. what it’s not and then we’re going to get into what it is. But this is what I mean by–this is one thing I mean by scene setting, alright. We are in a hole in the ground, a hobbit hole and whatever else we know about it or we don’t know anything about it except that it means comfort. Now in the next scene, in the next slide we’re going to see how that gets played out. But just a couple of things I want to point out here. Our omniscient narrator is standing outside the scene, right? This is not a – this is not close narration. This is what we call distant narration where we’re not in a scene yet. We’re just sort of getting some general ideas about what we can expect from this world. One way to think about scene setting and exposition is to think in terms of expectation setting, right? So in the first page or two of a story, maybe you might say in the first paragraph even, The author starts setting expectations for you as the reader.
Here’s what you can begin to expect from this story. And that’s everything from the tone, what kind of–when I say tone, what I really mean is the author or maybe the narrator’s attitude toward the content. We have expectations about what kind of characters we’re going to be dealing with, expectations about what kind of world this is. Now one thing to say about expectations and setting expectations and managing expectations is that sometimes the storyteller is setting expectations up to break those expectations and sometimes they’re setting up expectations in order to fulfill those expectations. But think about when you as a reader sit down with a piece of literature one of the first things you’re doing is kind of figuring out what can I expect here, right? And so even in this opening, these opening lines of The Hobbit, we have some expectations set, right? I love the sort of matter of fact way that the narrator mentions hobbits as if we know what hobbits are, right? And there’s something about this that feels like I’m kind of being dropped into a world without a ton of explanation. And I realize we’re going to get a little more explanation as we go on in this chapter. But I think that’s a really neat trick that a lot of writers do, where they will just sort of drop in. Well, I know we know what hobbits are, because hobbits have been around in our sort of literary imagination for decades now. But think about if you read this for the first time. You don’t know what a hobbit is. And the way the narrator just kind of casually mentions, Now there’s this hobbit. And in that, it kind of feels like I’m being invited into a world that it’s OK if I don’t understand what’s going on. The alien-ness of it is part of the fun. And then that’s such a surprising little opening sentence. Again, I know we’re familiar with this sentence because the hobbit’s been around for so long. But it’s really a strange way to start. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. And think about what happens in your brain if that was the first time you saw that. You don’t know what a hobbit is, and you don’t know what kind of hole we’re talking about, or why he lives in a hole. And then in the next sentences, we get a little explanation here. So we are being oriented, again, our expectations are being set, right? I don’t know what kind of hole you picture the first time you see this, but Tolkien, or the narrator, addresses it here. Not a nasty, dirty, smelly, wet hole, right? Not a dry sandy hole but a comfortable hole. Well, this is–one thing I want to point out about this and this is pretty typical of the expository part of a story, the part of a story where we’re getting background. Think about how distant the narrator is here, alright. We are not at this point seeing things from any one character’s perspective the way you do in say first person narration or in close third person narration, we are kind of standing outside getting the big picture.
Sometimes this is the way, you know, this is a sort of say pretty typical way for stories to start. I don’t know what’s typical. It’s a common way for stories to start. Sometimes stories just start right in, not with this sort of background exposition. You know, you just jump right into the action, or you’re seeing things from one character’s perspective or whatever. Here the narrator is backed pretty far out, just giving us the big picture of what we can expect. Later on, a few pages in, the narrator’s going to zoom in, and we’re going to see things from Bilbo’s perspective. We’re going to be invited into a scene. It’s almost like we are invited into the room with Bilbo when Gandalf shows up. But right now, we’re not in the room with Bilbo. just getting this nice little exposition, this nice little background. Hey reader, I’m inviting you into this world. I’m not inviting you into a room yet. I’m inviting you into a world where you can begin to know what to expect. Okay, moving on. Even though in an exposition you’re sort of getting the big picture, you’re getting a a general idea. To the extent that you can, it’s pretty important to use concrete language, right? Concrete sensory language. In other words, giving exposition is not your free pass to be just big and abstract all the time. So even in these first few sentences, even though this is sort of big picture, we’re still, you know, got the ends of worms. You don’t get much more concrete and earthy than that, right? A nasty, dirty, wet hole filled the ends of worms and an oozy smell, right, even though we are getting exposition, this is still sensory.
That’s a great little writing tip, okay. We talk about pulling out and pulling in, these kinds of things, but you need to always be looking for ways to introduce the sensory, right.
So we’ve got nasty, dirty, wet, oozy smell, ends of worms. Think how many senses Tolkien is appealing to right here in the exposition, right? Right here in the, you know, as he’s providing background he’s still finding ways to engage your senses. And so the other thing I want to point out is this little sentence ends with an abstract noun, comfort. But what we’re going to see next is he’s going to start explaining comfort in concrete terms, not in abstract terms. So yes, comfort is an abstraction, but the only way we know what comfort is is when we see comfortable things. And so we’re going to see that in just a minute. It had a perfectly round door. I know it says hole. Sorry, that’s a typo. the round door like a porthole, painted green with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.” See how concrete and specific we’re getting here? “The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel, a very comfortable tunnel.” There’s that word again, comfort, comfortable. “Without smoke, with paneled walls and floors and tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats.
The hobbit was fond of visitors.” Alright, so So we are establishing what normal is for the hobbit. And we are doing it in concrete terms. We’re getting a look at his home. It tells us something about who this hobbit is. He’s the kind of person who likes visitors. And so I love the way– again, and we’re going to see this over and over again in this book– Tolkien finds these concrete details, these specific details as a way to bear out ideas like a hobbit being fond of visitors.
Okay, now we, it’s one thing to say the hobbit was fond of visitors and in doing that we would actually find that a pretty helpful explanation, right.
But notice how Tolkien is always looking for the concrete specific detail that is the outworking of that description, And I think this is, I think of this as sort of going the extra mile, right?
If he just said the hobbit was fond of visitors, we wouldn’t have even, it wouldn’t have occurred to us to say, gosh, I wish we had a specific concrete detail to go with that, right? That wouldn’t, none of us would think of that. But what he did is he gives it to us and we’re like, now we see a world, a little house in in which the hobbit’s feelings and his view of the world finds its expression in the physical facts of his life. And that way of thinking about the world is so important for a writer. If you are a writer, I want you to think about, when you think about what your character is like, the next step is how does that, how do these truths about this character work themselves out in the physical facts of his existence and then show me those, right.
So I’ve got a hobbit who likes to have guests. How does that play itself out in his physical effects, right? Well in this case he has a house that has lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats. And so just as Bilbo has thought through his own hospitality and in a similar way Tolkien And it’s thinking through the hospitality of the story, of inviting you in as a reader to see this little world where you understand something about who we’re dealing with here. All right? We’re setting expectations. That’s what happens in this exposition part of the story. Now let’s see what we’ve got next. I’m not going to spend much time on this idea of realism of content versus realism of presentation because I talk about it at some length in the writing through the wardrobe class.
But just to remind you, the idea of realism of content versus realism of presentation says in effect a story can be realistic in terms of whether it talks about things that actually happen in the world around us.
So a police show is realistic, that’s realism of content. Like right if you watch a police show and you see people you know driving around in police cars and arresting perpetrators and all that kind of stuff, the kind of stuff that really happens in the world, that’s realism of content. Whereas a story about hobbits and elves and wizards, that is not, the content is not realistic. And we are invited into a world that’s not like the world where we actually live, right? So that is the issue of realism of content. But the real question is realism of presentation. Whether or not your content is realistic, you have to ask the question, let’s just pretend there was a world where there were hobbits and elves and dragons and dwarves and wizards. If there were such a world, then how would that world play itself out in, especially in sort of the physical facts of that world?
And so I don’t believe in hobbits. I don’t think hobbits exist in the world. But once I accept the possibility that I’m in a world with hobbits, now the question is, how can the author realistically portray that world in such a way that I’m saying, OK, if there were a world with hobbits, what would that world look like? Well, it would be a world where the hobbits had lots of pegs for hats and coats. So that’s an example of realism of presentation. So another way to put it is when you ask the reader to suspend their disbelief and believe in a world where there are hobbits, you only want them to suspend that disbelief once.
Then once they’ve accepted that possibility, now introduce them into a world where it feels real so that on every page I’m not still suspending my disbelief. Now that I accept that there’s hobbits, now I’m in a world that feels real. And so realism of presentation is a matter of how do you create the textures of a world that feel like a real place. And you have to do this by the way whether you are doing realism of content or not. So even if you are writing a story that happens in the real world, the world where we live, you’re writing a police story, you’ve still got to use the details that make that world feel real. You still are on the hook for realism of presentation whether or not you have realism of content or not. And that’s what we’re seeing in this opening is Tolkien giving this realism of presentation, offering up these details so that this feels like a real world with the textures of a not necessarily this real world but a real world.
Okay, now as I said, one issue of background or of setting the scene is what kind of place do we have? But another issue, another question is what are the sort of social dynamics of that world? Okay, as I’m setting the scene I really need to be thinking about what are the social dynamics of the characters in this world? And so here’s an example from the first chapter of The Hobbit in which Tolkien is, you know, setting the scene by explaining the social dynamics of that world.
“The Bagginses had lived in the neighborhood of the hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected.
could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. So we live in a world, you know, the hobbit world values, they respect wealth, not surprisingly, but they also respect a solidity whereby people don’t go out and have adventures. So this is just background, this is a way of presenting a world. This is, we’re talking about what is normal for the hobbits. Now then we’re going to spend 90% of the book in a world that’s not normal for the hobbits. But here we are establishing what is normal for Bilbo. Again, this world where respectability equals being a homebody. Here’s a nice little summary of, I mean, kind of what I mean when I’m talking about this move from the normal to the rising action to the climax down in a resolution into a new normal which is Freitag’s pyramid. For a Baggins it is normal to be unadventurous but this is a story in which a Baggins has an adventure and finds himself doing insane things that are altogether unexpected.
So normal is expected and now we’re going to spend a whole story talking about this Baggins doing things that he didn’t expect to do. Which by the way is kind of true of–that’s just how–that’s what a story is, right? You don’t tell a story–when you start telling a story, the whole expectation is that you’re going to say something unexpected, right? Nobody says, “Oh, I got to tell you a story. I went to the grocery store and I picked up my groceries and then I paid for my groceries and I put them in my car and drove home.
” That’s not a story. It’s only a story if you’re putting, you know, something unexpected happens. I’m putting my groceries in the back of my car and I’m approached by an alien. Now I’ve got a story. So that’s how stories work. We’ve got normal, we’ve got the expected and that’s an important part of the storytelling process to establish what’s normal and then we’re going to throw things out of whack. And that’s this summary of The Hobbit is kind of a summary of every story. We know what’s expected and then we get the unexpected. Now another thing I want to point out here about Bilbo and about this background that’s being offered here at the beginning of this story, this exposition, is the truth that The possibility of this unexpected behavior is already inside the hobbit.
So he is a Baggins, but he’s also a Took. And so what we have here is a juxtaposition. A juxtaposition just means putting two things side by side, which is a really important concept in storytelling. Good things happen when two things get put next to each other that don’t belong next to each other. You know, when a boa constrictor ends up in the backseat of a retiree’s car, those two things don’t go together and something interesting is going to happen, right? So that’s where story comes from is juxtaposition. In Bilbo himself there is a juxtaposition, right? He is a Baggins, his last name is Baggins and the Baggins are respectable because they don’t have adventures and yet the other part of him is Took. And the Tooks are people who have adventures and who aren’t quite respectable and they may have a fairy wife somewhere in the background, right. And so that juxtaposition inside of Bilbo helps explain what happens to Bilbo. We’re going to be talking later about the idea of character-driven action versus action that just happens to somebody. And those two things, it’s really important to think about what kind of action you are going to be working with in the story that you write. Both kinds are very legitimate, but it’s really helpful to know which kind you’re working with. Well, some of the action here, some of the things that happen to Bilbo, they don’t just happen to him from the outside. They happen because he’s part toke and that toke-ishness wakes up in him right here in chapter one. And so I’m not going to read through this passage. That’s the essence of what is going on in this passage, right? We’ve got the toke-ishness and the hobbit and the baggins-ishness competing inside of boy Bilbo. Okay back to Freytag’s pyramid for just a minute. We have established this original normal, right, the exposition. That’s what the first few pages of The Hobbit do. And then according to Freytag there is an inciting incident somewhere very early in the book that blows up this equilibrium and now the story starts.
And now we have what we call rising action where things get a little more complicated and a little more complicated and a little more complicated until they reach a point of climax where they’re so complicated that something has to give. Now we’re going to talk about the rising action, the climax and the resolution in later lessons. What we’re talking about here is this inciting event. There’s something in a story typically, I say typically, it’s almost always true that blows up the old normal and now we’re off on an adventure, we’re off on a story. And so in Harry Potter, those stories, Harry’s original normal is a pretty rotten normal, right? He’s living under the stairs at his cousin’s house and basically a prisoner. And then the letters from the owls come and we’re off on an adventure, right? That normal gets all blown up. and the story starts then. Then we have a rising action. Just about any story you think of, you can think about what– there’s some inciting event that causes the old normal to– that old equilibrium to now be in disequilibrium. And that’s one way to think about how a story starts. So what is the inciting event that interrupts the nice little equilibrium that Bilbo Baggins lives in? Well it’s the arrival of Gandalf, right, and the dwarves. And so once Gandalf arrives, things are never going to be the same again for the Hobbit, for Bilbo. And so that is an external event that happens to him, yes. It’s very common for the inciting incident to come from outside. Actually I would say that it’s usually the case that the inciting event is something that some force that comes from outside the equilibrium, outside the character in order to set things in motion.
Maybe a coincidence. Maybe they win the lottery. Maybe they have a car crash. I don’t know. But something that the character didn’t bring on themselves sets things in motion. And yet, this is a really important point. While it’s fine for an external event to set things in motion, the real story has to somehow involve how that person responds to that event.
So people aren’t billiard balls. They’re not just getting worked on by forces outside them and moving around. There’s a limit to how interesting that is. The real interesting part of a story is the motivations of the character, how the character’s character, so to speak, his desires, his longings, his skills, his values, how do those play out once that external event happens to him?
And so I like this little passage here where once the dwarves have arrived and Bilbo has spend an evening with the dwarves, something wakes up in him.
He thought he was a baggins with the toque under control, but when this external event comes and throws him into disequilibrium, something he didn’t ask for, it is external coming to him, but now something is changing in him. As they sang, the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves, then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains and hear the pine trees and the waterfalls and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking stick.
” Isn’t that great? I love that. And, you know, it’s worth noting that sometimes the equilibrium at the beginning of a story isn’t what it appears to be, right? And so when Bilbo has this very comfortable life and this very easy and a life that he values, you know, his first breakfast and his second breakfast and elevensies and all these, you know, all this comfortable life of his with all the pegs on the walls, what’s really going on is there’s more to him than he knows and that’s waking up and now the story is going to get moving. That inciting event which came from the outside sets things in motion that yes there will still be things happening from the outside to Bilbo but a lot of what’s going on is that what’s going on inside Bilbo plays itself out in action. And this is what I mean when I speak of the difference between external events and character driven action. The external events can set things in motion but you’ve got to make sure as you tell your stories that some of that action is coming, that’s happening because our character is who he or she is. If Gandalf and the dwarves had showed up at a different kind of hobbit’s house, a different kind of story would have happened. It may have been a very short story where the person said “get out of my house, I’m too comfortable and I don’t need you and I don’t need my life to be disrupted,” which is what Bilbo thought was true of him. But in this inciting of incident, something wakes up in him and now he’s going to move into the story. You know, that, that, one way to think about equilibrium, equilibrium and disequilibrium and why it, why disequilibrium is a story function is that, you know, I’m standing here at equilibrium. standing there all day long, but once I start, once I get a little disequilibrium, I step, right? And if that disequilibrium continues, I step again. And that disequilibrium moves us into the story. It keeps us moving forward. And so we as human beings value equilibrium, right? That’s something we look for. But what you find in a story is that once you, you know, that equilibrium is not a story. only when it gets off balance. And then, you know, when I take a step to reestablish my equilibrium sometimes that throws things off again and I have to take another step in the story.
And that’s what rising action is. We’ll talk more about this later. I’m getting ahead of myself. Alright, that gets us to the end of lesson one, scene setting and the inciting incident. In the next lesson, lesson two, we’re going to talk about dialogue.