Appendix B: Map of Brainland

Appendix C: The Lens of Business

So before we talk about Star Wars and Phantom Menace specifically, we need to understand in general what movies deliver.

Movies are a service, not a product. A service is a process that produces an experience. All stories, including movies, are structured experiences that produce biological, or if you prefer, psychobiological responses in viewers. Effective movies deliver emotions, desires, and feelings all the way through.

Whoa.

OK, so that’s not a stunning revelation we’re going to add to the Bible. But it’s essential to reviewing movies. When we say a movie wasn’t any good, what we’re saying is that it didn’t produce the fix of feelings we went to get. Or it didn’t produce them consistently throughout the experience.

The above may be obvious to you, but I find that reviewers and writers often don’t specify the goal. Without specifying the goal, all the talk about what a story "should" look like, all of the rules--show don’t tell, make your characters round, use tags in dialogue, don’t use tags in dialogue, create conflict in every scene, etc—become meaningless. We need to understand the purpose, then structure the story to fit that purpose. Only when we know the purpose do we know when the rules apply.

Stories have many purposes. But it seems to me that almost all of them boil down to one thing--we go to movies to get a hit of all-natural, 100% human-produced smack. We go to feel. We go for brain drugs.

I call this the mammalian brain surge because of the three brains experts say we have (Three!--how do they all fit?) emotion is supposed to reside in the mammalian brain (the other two brains are the reptilian brain and the neocortex). Whether we can divide our gray matter into three parts may be debated. The important thing is that our favorite stories always stimulate our feeling centers--wherever they reside.

This brain surge comes as a reaction to perceiving a situation or trying to perceive a situation. A "situation" is made up of three things:

• Characters
• Setting
• Events

"Character" includes everything we think about characters including their motives and current state of happiness. This state of happiness is key to many of the effects movies create in us. "Setting" includes all the other tangible things that aren’t characters. "Events" are what happens, how the characters interact with each other and with the setting.

The process from film to brain surge has three steps. First, the movie presents a situation through the medium of visual images and sound. Next, we try to make sense of the stimulus. Finally, the situation evokes a reaction in us.

Now this may not seem like rocket science. But I believe it’s essential to understand how stories work. I suppose many authors intuitively understand this. But I also suspect that those authors who know the effect they’re after and know how to create it deliver more consistently (I’ve included a section in the appendix called Lens of Business that applies a common customer-focused product development process to stories).

Telling stories is no different than baking pies, manufacturing cars, or providing Love Boat cruises—they are all designed around giving something to someone. In businesses, we try to determine and consistently deliver what the customer wants. If we’re a pie-maker, this doesn’t mean we can’t take joy in making and sharing pies. It doesn’t mean we have to reduce pie making to a sterile calculation of effect. It simply recognizes the fact that I can’t share a pie nobody wants to eat.

In Which We Discuss the Main Effects Movies Deliver

So what are all these effects? I see six effects we commonly seek:

1. Sympathetic Wahoo
2. Curiosity
3. Wanna
4. Wonder
5. Humor
6. Insight

We don’t all react in the same way to the situations presented to us. So while we may all seek common effects, our reactions to the situations a movie presents us can vary widely. The reasons for and consequences of this variance is a matter for another time. The thing to remember is that everyone’s reaction is a valid reaction. We cannot say they didn’t or should not have had that reaction. They did. Period.

For example, Jar Jar Binks annoyed me to no end. But many of my eleven-year-old friends thought he was the best part of the story. The lesson to take from this is that storytellers, just like everyone else, cannot please everyone. And because they cannot please everyone, storytellers better darn well know who they’re trying to reach and what those folks want, or the story is likely to fail.

When the story fails in some way, we have a negative reaction. Here are five of the most deadly:

1. Confusion
2. Disbelief & Disregard
3. Mistrust
4. Irritation & Anger
5. Boredom

Listing out all these effects is the first step to understanding how stories work. The next step is to identify which sequences created which effects. Once we’ve done that, we can start to reverse engineer how the storyteller created that reaction in us. Again, this paper will focus on how Phantom Menace and Star Wars evoked or failed to evoke belief, humor, and sympathetic wahoo.

I created a number of visuals and metaphors to help me clarify my thinking on the process of story to brain surge and the various story effects. All of them were helpful, but the one that jazzed me the most was a map of a place I call Brainland. I’ve included it at the end of this comparison. The key to Brainland is to remember that the trails are not long dusty roads. They are short neural pathways, and a situation may send signals down many paths at the same time.

For movies to create the positive effects in us, the situations they present must meet certain conditions. The first three things a viewer or reader must do are as follows:

1. Make sense of the situation
2. Trust the author
3. Believe the situation

These are not arbitrary standards. This is cause and effect.

First, we must be able to make sense of the situation. If we can’t make sense of it, if it’s not clear, then we can’t react with anything but confusion. Second, we must trust the author. If we feel attacked or threatened by the situation or by what the author is doing, we stop listening and start thinking of ways to defend ourselves or attack the author. Third, once we understand and trust, the situation must be believable. If we cannot believe it, we WILL disregard it.

Only after these three conditions are met can the situation work in us and stimulate the positive effects. I believe our brain processes all these conditions at the same time just as it processes simultaneously the many tastes and textures of a chilidog with the works. Lots of things in there, lots of flavors, lots of stuff to stimulate our nose and tongue. Our brain takes it all in at the same time and formulates a reaction. If there’s something nasty in the bite—hard lumpy things—it will ruin the experience.

Phantom Menace had some hard lumpy things in it that evoked disbelief in me. They were small, but consistent. I could not ignore the language of three of the characters because they talked throughout the movie. The three characters that kept bumping me out of the movie were Jar Jar Binks, The Battle Droids, and The Heimoidian Viceroy. Each time these characters came on screen and spoke, I reminded myself that this was all made up and closed myself off just a little bit more to the effects of the story.

It all started with Jar-Jar Binks. He was not simply Gungan. No, Jar Jar was Gungan, a Civil War Black slave, a 20^th century kid, and a Dr. Seuss character all rolled into one.

The very first time I heard Jar Jar and his Mee-sa You-sa pidgin, I thought of the 1800s and Black American slaves. I’m sure that says a bundle about me, but nevertheless, that is what I thought of. It bumped me. I heard something that reminded me of a Black slave. I saw Gungan. And the two things jarred against each other.

I had the same experience Dorothy did when she saw the Wizard of Oz fiddling with his levers behind the curtain. The spell was broken. And instead of feeling awe, I felt irritated. I could have forgotten it, but Jar Jar kept using those words and the conflicting connections his language evoked in me kept coming back.

The next image Jar Jar evoked was that of a little 20^th century kid. He used expressions like "How rude" and "Big doo-doo". This wasn’t the speech of an alien race set on a far away planet a long time ago. It was some pee-wee in my Sunday school class. I saw Gungan. I heard 20^th century kid jargon. And the two things jarred against each other.

The next image Jar Jar evoked was Dr. Seuss. In the escape vehicle Qui-Gon tells Amidala that she needs to trust him and Jar Jar says, "And who sir are you sir?" Not a big line, but nevertheless, I heard Fox In Socks by Dr. Seuss and saw Gungan.

Boing!—there’s that Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

I was willing to grant this elephant-footed Binks could swim underwater, but the beast’s language sounded like so many things un-Gungan that I was constantly being taken out of the setting and back to my home world. These speech problems don’t end with Jar Jar.

I did not believe the battle droids. In only a few places do the robots talk. In two of those places the droids use language which again sounds like something from earth, not something from a long-time ago, far far away.

One scene was in the hangar when Qui-Gon says they need ships. The robot acts like a deer in the headlights and says, "Does not compute." Then he points at him and says, "You’re under arrest." I immediately thought two things. First, why would a robot act like a befuddled human? And second, "does not compute" sounds like a line from the 1980s. It ripped me out of the hangar and put me in the 20^th century.

Now this one isn’t so bad. But out on the battlefield with the Gungans, the lead robot uses the term "Roger, Roger." That term is 20^th century radio speak. I thought of WW2 radio men in tanks. For me it was almost as strong a jargon as saying, "10-4, good buddy."

And after that one I started questioning everything about these robots. Why build them like humans? Why not use destroyers for everything? Why can’t they seem to hit anything with their blasters?

Now this is not all! No, this is not all.

The viceroy sounded like he came from Godzilla’s Japan. He had a B-movie Japanese accent. Stereotype Japanese and Gungan ALL the way through the movie—it didn’t work for me.

That blasted Wizard of Oz couldn’t keep his body parts behind the curtain.

I realize that Lucas has to write in a language I understand, but when he uses language that evokes mental images that conflict with the world he’s created, he fails to tell the story. Now in Star Wars Lucas used "Luke" and "Ben"--20^th century names. Names that would never occur on a planet far, far away, a long time ago. But these did not create disbelief in me.

Why?

Because they did not have strong ties to the worlds I know. They did not evoke something that doesn’t belong. Luke and Ben are not slang, jargon, or words with strong cultural or connotative meaning. If Lucas had used Ben Obi Franklin, the Princess Marilyn Monroe, or Dude Skywalker the mental images would have jarred against each other. And I would have laughed or been bumped out of the story.

Why not do what Star Wars did with Greedo and Jaba and use sub titles? It’s far more convincing. Or have them call for a translator. Or have them converse like Hans and Chewie or C3P0 and R2D2 do—one speaks English and the other speaks Wookie and droid, and we understand the intent of the conversation by the reaction of the English speaker. Or if they must speak some form of English, let them speak an English or pidgin that doesn’t place me back in my own world.

The things we’ve discussed so far don’t seem to amount to much. I may sound like some persnickety English teacher. I’m not; I can’t stand grammar for grammar’s sake. I can’t stand any rule for the sake of the rule. It’s just that there’s a huge difference between stimulating my unbelief once and doing it a number of times. Once I will forget or forgive. But a small jarring, then another small jarring, then another ten minutes later is enough to keep you out for the whole experience. It’s like sleep apnea. Individually, the jarrings are insignificant. But strung out in a series they can be worse that somebody whapping you on the side of the head.

Star Wars didn’t break the dream. All of the decisions and language in Star Wars were believable, but Star Wars did have a few small things that took me out of the world. I noticed two things that jostled me. There was the "parsecs" incident, and there was that grinning alien at the bar who looked like the devil. Why would I ignore these? They are not any less significant than those things that bumped me out of the setting in the Phantom Menace.

The answer is I didn’t.

"Parsecs" doesn’t have a great deal of meaning to me. I think this is the first time I’ve ever used the word. I’d have to look it up to tell you exactly what it means. So the jarring was intellectual—oh yeah, there’s the goof I read about. And the devil image was brief. So Satan was hanging around a bar, what’s new? He made a brief appearance and disappeared. The jarring was slight and disappeared quickly. It did not keep coming back to torment me.

The second effect Phantom Menace delivered less of was humor.

Phantom Menace and Star Wars offered different kinds of humor. Phantom Menace employed sight gags with Jar Jar Binks. These sight gags included things like Jar Jar hanging onto Qui-Gon in Muppet fashion, Jar Jar stepping in poop, Jar Jar numbing his tongue, and Jar Jar’s king flapping his jowls.

Star Wars, on the other hand, employed exaggerated and unexpected character responses in stressful situations—Han Solo trying to cover up the prison break and charging after dozens of storm troopers.

Much of the Star Wars humor was generated by prods (minor conflicts) between the good guys. All the barbs Leia cast at Han Solo for his rescue attempt fall into this category. Likewise, R2D2 and C3PO were a perfect odd couple. R2 leads the two of them into danger, and C3PO reacts with many humorous, melodramatic exclamations of blame, misery, and woe.

I do not prefer one type of humor over the other. I like sight gags, banter, and exaggeration. The issue was that Jar Jar Binks annoyed me so much, I couldn’t laugh at him. The ultimate failure occurred for me on the battlefield. I wasn’t dissatisfied with the Gungan retreat. I was dissatisfied that the whole battle boiled down to me watching an annoying idiot bumble about.

I don’t think I have to sympathize with a character to laugh. I didn’t sympathize with the villain in Costner’s Robin Hood, yet I still laughed at his lines. I simply must not be annoyed. And Jar Jar annoyed me with his speech, the high pitch of his voice, and his stupid incompetence. It just wasn’t funny to me.

Now if the negative effects of the language and humor were all I experienced, Phantom Menace still could have rocked me. But it didn’t because it failed to meet the conditions necessary to produce sympathetic wahoo in all but two sequences.

Sympathetic wahoo is the KING of story effects. The other ruling magistrate, by the way, is curiosity. Creating and resolving these two effects is the essence of story telling.

So what’s sympathetic wahoo?

Sympathetic wahoo is the bundle of emotions we experience that center around a sympathetic character, the situations the characters find themselves in, and how they work towards happiness. Again, this is the main effect we go to movies for. There’s a pattern to creating these emotions. The sympathetic wahoo process has four parts:

1. We see a sympathetic & interesting character
2. We feel that character’s happiness is threatened
3. Our sympathetic desire is built and intensified
4. Our stress for the character is resolved

The wahoo comes in steps 2 to 4. When we see this character, we imagine how it would feel were we in the character’s place. And as a result, we feel emotions. We feel the dark side—things like stress, fear, terror, loss, and sadness. We also feel the light side—things like gratitude, love, and triumph. In all of this, notice that the feelings center in the audience, NOT the character.

I don’t know why sympathetic wahoo happens. I also don’t know what causes these feelings. Are these feelings merely adrenaline, endorphins, both, or something else? There’s a whole field of study dedicated to emotions that I haven’t even scratched.

Now while I confess ignorance, I do want to point out that one author has made some interesting connections between stories and feelings. Dave Wolverton has written his theory about this in which he suggests that we go to stories for the calming effect of endorphins. Our body releases this morphine chemical in response to stress. Stories, Wolverton suggests, produce stress in us by putting a sympathetic character through stress.

Dave Wolverton first introduced me to this idea in one of his Writer’s of the Future Workshops back in 1993. He wrote his idea up in an article for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Workshop newsletter administered by Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury. I can’t remember which issue it was in, but you ought to check it out. You can contact SF&FW at www.sff.net/people/Dalton-Woodbury/sffw.htp.

Wolverton’s theory seems reasonable, but I haven’t seen or conducted any experiments to verify the connection, so I don’t know. Furthermore, I think there’s more to feeling good than that one chemical. But whether it’s endorphins, another chemical, or something else is beside the point. The insight to me from this theory is that (1) humans are built for sympathy and feeling for others. (2) A combination of psychological and chemical factors create these emotions, or as I prefer, wahoo. And (3) we can identify a number of basic principles of eliciting wahoo in people who watch movies.

Now each of the four steps in the sympathetic wahoo process has conditions. We need to talk about these briefly first, then I’ll detail how Phantom Menace failed to meet these conditions for me.

First, we must see a sympathetic and interesting character.

By "sympathetic" I simply mean someone we can feel for and root for. Someone who we think does NOT deserve pain and suffering. We will not root for just anyone. A sympathetic person must have a number of qualities. You and I may disagree on a few of these qualities, but I think we will agree on the majority of them.

These qualities are simply reflections of values and beliefs we hold about what is right, good, and proper. We adopt these values from many sources. Some we create on our own. Others come from our families, the communities we belong to, and from our conscience (whatever you believe the source of that to be). You and I may have different values because we have different roles in life, because we belong to different communities, and because we listen in varying degrees to our conscience. We may interpret the same situation differently. For example, to me it might be good for Obi-Wan to kill Darth Maul, but for a person who holds extreme views of pacifism, Obi-Wan might be contemptible.

The thing to remember is that a sympathetic person is defined by OUR values and beliefs on what is right, good, and proper in any situation.

So what kind of person is good? What kind of person deserves happiness? Here’s my short list. I believe that people who have these qualities should NOT suffer. They should be happy. I can root for someone who is:

• Kind
• Proactive
• Smart
• Humble
• Good-humored
• More selfless than self-centered
• Fighting for a noble cause

Just as in life, we form a first impression. Then as time goes on, we see the character interact with others and react to situations. We learn about that character’s motives, actions, and the consequences of those actions.

And we judge them.

All three elements—motive, action, and consequence—are essential and affect our judgement. If the motive and action are right, good, and proper, we root for them. If their motive or behavior is not right, good, and proper then we root against them. Sympathy is linked to our sense of justice and mercy.

I find it hard to root for people who are the following:

• Mean
• Without dreams or goals
• Unwilling to act
• Lazy
• Whining
• Haughty
• Too serious
• Self-serving

Such characters I turn away from. I figure they should reap what they sow.

So the character must be sympathetic. But they must also be interesting because often if all we see is suffering, we get bored. Something about the character must attract us. Again, what is interesting to you and me will vary. I’m interested in people who are:

• Different
• Proactive & passionate
• Powerful or skillful
• Humorous
• Insightful
• Doing cool things

Notice that in these lists I find that proactive characters generate sympathy and interest. Characters who don’t act, don’t plan, don’t want something are very boring to me.

Luke Skywalker was sympathetic and interesting (not as interesting as Han Solo, however). He was good, proactive, fought for a good cause, had special powers, and did cool things. He wasn’t the epitome of good. Characters don’t need to be pure. The good simply needs to outweigh the bad on the scales of our justice.

As has been pointed out by numerous people, an interesting twist is to make both the antagonist and protagonist sympathetic and interesting. It’s nice to have good against bad. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s also thrilling to have good against good or good against cool once in a while.

Phantom Menace did not fail in providing sympathetic and interesting characters. Anakin, Qui-Gon, and Amidala were all good people, fighting for good causes. They were all proactive in various situations. Anakin and Qui-Gon had special powers and did cool things. Amidala had exotic hair-doos. Lucas provided people for me to root for. But he failed to produce much wahoo in the other three steps of the process.

Before we move to those other three steps, I want you to know that I have found only one person who has thought AND written extensively about the sympathetic effect. He was not an entertainer. He lived in the 1700s. I recommend his work highly to you. His name is Adam Smith. Yes, he’s the same one who wrote The Wealth of Nations. But that isn’t his masterpiece even though his "invisible hand" is the buzz word of American economics. His masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned, is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Read it. You may disagree with him in a few places, but I believe The Theory of Moral Sentiments offers great insights on the process of evoking emotions that center around story people.

Seeing someone good and interesting does not produce sympathetic wahoo. It only prepares us to feel. The wahoo occurs when we see the happiness of a good and interesting person put at risk. That’s what stirs our fellow feelings. When such a character is suffering, we feel sympathy. When such a character is in jeopardy of suffering, we feel sympathy. When such a character encounters opposition to their dreams, plans, or hopes, we feel sympathy. In such situations, we feel this good person should be happy. And we root for them.

If we feel their happiness lies in finding love, then we want them to find love (Luke and Leia). If we feel their happiness lies in finding safety, then we want them to find safety (escaping from the Death Star). If we feel their happiness lies in winning a race, then we want them to win the race (Anakin and the pod race). Anything that may bring them more happiness, we want that thing for them. Anyone that stands in the way of their happiness, we want that person removed.

There are three requirements for the threat. To stir our sympathy threats to characters need to be the following:

• Specific
• Significant
• Immediate

First, the obstacle or threat to happiness needs to be specific. This means it must directly impact a specific character. We sympathize most with specific individuals, not groups of people. Children starving in Africa move us. But when we know the name of a child, when we see a specific child’s specific struggles, that opens the gates to our sympathy.

Second, this suffering does NOT have to be ultimate suffering, but it must be significant. And the audience, not the character, defines what is significant.

For example, a child moaning about the tragedy of not getting a cookie after dinner doesn’t stir adults much because most of them don’t think it matters. A sympathetic character suffering from a hangnail doesn’t stir our breasts with emotion. However, a sympathetic character suffering from some physical deformity does. Lovers parting for a weekend don’t excite much of anything, even though they may think it’s the end of the world. However, lovers parting because one has been made a concubine to the High Lord excites our sympathy.

Third, the threat or suffering must be immediate. It’s hard to worry about things that are going to occur fifty years from now. It has to occur now or in the immediate future. Imagine how much sympathy we’d feel for Luke if we saw Obi-Wan tell him he’d fall into a garbage compactor fifty years from now and almost get crushed. If we were to cut to that scene, the stress would be immediate. But if we watched Luke shop for land cruisers and meet girls for two hours, we wouldn’t feel the stress. The suffering or threat must be immediate.

Beyond these three conditions, there are two caveats about threats. These caveats are as follows:

• Character must continue to exhibit sympathetic qualities
• What the character knows doesn’t matter

First, the character must continue to exhibit sympathetic qualities. We judge characters continually. If someone suddenly stops trying, we will feel they don’t deserve to win. If a character becomes cruel in his stress, he becomes less sympathetic. If we discover someone’s motives have been self-serving all along, we turn on him. It doesn’t matter how long we’ve sympathized with the character, when he, she, or it starts to exhibit behavior that does not fit our definition of what is right, good, and proper, our sympathy turns to condemnation.

There is hope. Characters don’t have to be perfect. A character may do something wrong, and we will forgive them, IF they merit forgiveness. We are especially quick to forgive when the evil they’ve done is downplayed. Hence Darth Vader can pillage and kill and with one act of goodness gain our sympathy. We reason he’s had a change of heart. He pays the price, and we forgive him.

Second, what the character knows about the threat doesn’t matter. It’s what the audience understands that matters. Adam Smith says it nicely, "Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion [how a character reacts to what he’s experienced], as from that of the situation which excites it" (p12). The way to evoke sympathy is to show the audience the situations that would stress their happiness.

Showing a character’s reaction and emotion evokes our fellow-feelings only slightly. When Anakin chastises Amidala for calling him a slave, we can’t sympathize much with him. We cannot resent him being called that until we understand the circumstances that led up to his emotions. Now if we had seen the awful things he’d gone through, the cause of his reaction, we would have felt a greater sympathy for him. If we had seen those causes and NOT seen Anakin’s feelings about being a slave, we still would have felt sympathy for him. The character’s emotions are beside the point as long as they are, by our definition, right, good, and proper for the situation.

So what kinds of things threaten happiness?

I see three categories of needs or conditions for happiness. Anytime one of these needs is at risk our character’s happiness is threatened. Here are the three categories:

• Physical
• Social
• Meaning

Physical needs are simply things like life, security, freedom from physical pain or mutilation, and food. Star Wars movies use these types of situations frequently. Here are some examples, Luke in jeopardy of being killed by Darth Vader; good guys in jeopardy of being crushed in garbage compactor; R2 and C3PO in jeopardy of being caught by Darth Vader. In all of these situations the physical needs of the characters are at stake.

Social needs include things like belonging, finding love or companionship, and the safety of loved ones. Star Wars movies contain threats to these needs as well. At the end of Star Wars Luke is attracted to Leia. We want him to find love. This is carried through until he finds out she’s his sister.

Meaning needs center around finding life meaningful and free from oppression or drudgery. Star Wars movies don’t deal much with these conditions. It’s not necessary that every movie contain threats to every type of need. However, to give you an idea of these types of needs, think about movies like October Sky, Rocky, and Dead Poets Society. In these three movies meaning needs drove the plot.

Again, we need to see the situations that will cause the reaction, not the reaction itself. I cannot feel the loss of a loved one until I love the one lost. I cannot feel the joy of belonging until I’ve felt ostracism. We need to see the cause. Then the audience will have the reaction instead of watching and wondering why the character is having the reaction.

So how does Phantom Menace stack up?

Well, this is where Phantom Menace failed. I did not feel anyone’s happiness was at stake except in two places—the pod race and the battle with Darth Maul. Notice, I said, "feel". Intellectually, I knew there were "threats" out there. But I did not feel them.

Now after we see a sympathetic character and something that stresses that character’s happiness, we’ve got to build the stress. If we immediately resolve the stress, the audience will feel only a small fellow-feeling.

How do authors build and intensify our sympathetic desire? I find the following things build and intensify desire in me:

• Suspend the resolution
• Increase the amount of suffering or threat
• Increase the sympathetic nature of the character
• Make the character suffer unjustly
• Decrease the hope we have that the character can achieve happiness

Any one of these things builds my desire. If an author uses all of them my sympathetic desires consume me.

There’s seems to be two general rules. First, an author can’t set up something unbelievable like C3PO in a light saber duel with Darth Maul because such situations create unbelief. Second, an author needs to give the audience a break. Constant stress may work against itself by making it too painful to watch. Authors often will show us situations of stress and follow them with situations that evoke relatively less stress.

Now because we’re biological, we can’t resolve our character’s problems quickly. This sympathy is like sex, hunger, thirst, wanting love—any of our appetites and passions. To stimulate the feeling centers takes TIME. So an author can’t resolve things quickly if he or she wants the audience to experience a deep effect.

Meals are always more satisfying after fasting. Always. Because we’ve built the desire, the hunger. And building hunger takes time. The longer we go, the greater our hunger and the greater our relief when we eat. We cannot feel the true joy of eating until we’ve fasted.

Applied to stories, we cannot feel the true joy of escape if we escape immediately. We cannot feel the joy and peace of security if the bully is immediately neutralized. We cannot feel the triumph of victory if we beat the antagonist the first time he opposes us.

We must have more than a brief exposure to a situation that excites our fellow-feeling. Showing a number of these situations takes time.

For example, in Star Wars Lucas did not resolve the stress of the storm troopers hunting the droids quickly. He suspended the resolution of that immediate threat for many scenes. As a result, our stress and desire for the droids’ increased dramatically. If they had evaded the storm troopers the minute they blasted off in the escape pod, we would have felt little or nothing at all.

I’ve noticed that my sympathy for the characters rise when more and more is placed at stake. The more despair or pain I feel, the sweeter my joy when the pain is overcome. The more desperate and needy I feel, the greater my gratitude when someone helps. The more joy I feel with a loved one, the greater my sadness when I lose them. I cannot know the bitter without the sweet. This is life. It’s as natural a principle as gravity.

Here are ways I commonly see authors increase what’s at stake:

• Add more of the same suffering
• Stress happiness in another need category
• Threaten more things the character holds dear
• Have the character try something which makes things go worse
• If a character has a success, show how that success makes things worse
• Threaten other characters we’ve come to sympathize with

Star Wars increased the amount of threat to Luke from the time he met the droids until he decided to go with Obi-Wan. At first we know the droids are in trouble. Luke might get hassled. Then we see that storm troopers have killed the Jawas who caught the droids. Obviously, this is very serious. Then we see that storm troopers killed his aunt and uncle. We know at this point that Luke’s life is at stake. At the beginning we didn’t have much sympathetic stress for Luke’s happiness. But by the time he joins Obi-Wan we have a great deal more. Not just because we’ve been with him more, but also because more of his happiness is at stake.

This simply means the author shows the character doing the right, good, and proper thing in the most difficult of circumstances. When this happens, we will think—I could not act that well in that situation. And when that happens and is believable, our sympathy will turn into admiration.

In Star Wars we didn’t have much sympathy for Han Solo. Oh, he was a good guy and interesting, but he was selfish and complained most of the time. However, when he came back for unselfish reasons and blew Darth Vader off Luke’s back, we not only cheered because a great threat had been eliminated, but suddenly we were grateful to him. He was a good guy before. We never rooted against him. But with that one act, he solidified our support. In future movies we felt more sympathy for Han because of that one act that boosted his sympathetic nature.

It’s one thing for a character to have made a bad decision and reap the consequences. Their motives may have been good, but they made a poor decision. We feel for them, but in the backs of our minds we know it was within the bounds of what was just.

However, if a character suffers because someone else is self-serving, unfeeling, or unjust in any way then our sympathy burns bright. This is one of the most powerful ways to build sympathy because not only do we root for a character, we also we root AGAINST their adversary. In fact, sometimes we don’t care who we root for just as long as they fight against the character who has our antipathy.

In order for us to see the unjust suffering, we need to understand the actions AND motives of the character creating the injustice. When both motive and action fall outside our definition of what is right, good, and proper, something inside us rises up in passionate opposition to the injustice.

In Star Wars, Darth Vader built a huge case against himself. When he killed Obi-Wan, he sealed our antipathy. He was a cruel and unjust person. Yes, he opposed Luke, but he could have been an antagonist who fought the rebels because he felt their way would only bring more violence or risk to people at large. He could have had noble motives for his deeds. But he did not. Vader was unjust and cruel. We rooted against Darth Vader as much as we rooted for Luke.

You can only make things so bad and then the audience stops believing it. Furthermore, the audience will not feel any fellow-feeling unless they think the character has a chance of losing. Make the character the underdog and our feelings soar. Every time an author makes it less and less likely that the character will succeed in avoiding the threat or escaping suffering, the fire of sympathy burns brighter. Here are ways I commonly see authors decrease the odds in favor of the character:

• Show the character fail with the obvious and many of the less apparent options
• Give the character no good choices
• Increase the power of the antagonists
• Show audience what’s going to happen but don’t let the character know
• Add a time deadline which reduces the odds of succeeding (the timebomb or ticking clock)
• Show someone else failing miserably to avoid the same stress
• Show the antagonist two steps ahead of our sympathetic character
• Have a key person betray the character
• Show a key part of the plan fall through
• Bring up unforeseen things that make the hero’s plan either unworkable, more risky, or harder to achieve

The character must be the underdog--we cannot feel triumph until we feel the character only has the smallest hope of succeeding. To succeed at creating sympathetic wahoo, authors need to dash the hopes the audience has for the character.

Now all this talk of threat and suffering doesn’t mean we don’t experience positive fellow feelings. But often those positive fellow-feelings don’t come until we’ve experienced the bad. How on earth can you feel relief if you haven’t been stressed? How can you feel joy if you haven’t felt pain? How can you feel the comfort of love if you haven’t been rejected?

I’ve probably beaten this idea of opposites to death, but this is where Lucas failed in Phantom Menace. He did not fail to do this in Star Wars. A perfect example was when Luke, Han, and the Princess were in the garbage compactor. Lucas steadily reduced the odds of them surviving until they were on the brink of being crushed. Only at the moment where there was no hope did R2 shut the thing down. Imagine how much less stress we would have felt if we knew all along that the odds of Luke surviving were almost 100%. Imagine how small our relief would have been if we’d had always seen an easy way out of the problem.

Finally, authors need to resolve the stress. The character needs to win or lose. If they lose, we will feel despair. If they win but it’s not worth it, we will feel despair. To feel triumph and joy, the character must win, and the audience must feel the reward was worth all the trouble.

There are ways of resolving the stress that give us a rush, and there are ways of resolving stress that dissipate our fellow-feelings. The way to give the audience a rush is to have the character resolve the problem. The way to dissipate the feeling is to resolve the stress with coincidence, unintentional actions, outside intervention, or having the problem just go away.

An example of giving the audience a rush through resolution was the Death Star destruction sequence in Star Wars. Our main characters overcame the stress of total destruction through their own efforts. The audience felt triumph.

What would have been our reaction if one of the Storm Trooper engineers simply tripped over his feet and hit the self-destruct button? What would have been our reaction if the Darth Vader attack trio had simply flown off because they had other business to attend to? What would have been our reaction if Luke had shot off his torpedoes without even knowing an exhaust vent existed? In every case, the stress is resolved, but the audience doesn’t get the rush.

So we need to resolve it in the way that works to create the emotion in the audience. And that way is to have the character resolve the issue or play a large role in resolving the issue. It may be this is a cultural, 20^th century convention. But I don’t think so.

It’s interesting to note that when we talk about "story" we are talking about the structure of two story effects--curiosity or sympathetic wahoo (I briefly mention the structure of curiosity in the Thrill-O-Meter). The solution to obtaining the character’s happiness describes the kind of story it is. There are three ways to eliminate the obstacle, suffering, or threat and obtain happiness. Those three ways are the following:

Card’s event story usually requires removing an external threat. His character story requires the character to adopt new beliefs or values. His idea story requires finding an answer to a puzzle or question.

Often stories will require more than one of these methods to eliminate the threat. Star Wars required Luke to exercise faith in the force so that he could eliminate the external threat. Is this an event or character story? I think it’s an event story because the root cause of the threat was external. If the root cause had been internal, it would have been a character story.

To recap, to create sympathetic wahoo in the audience an author has to do the following:

1. Present a sympathetic & interesting character
2. Make us feel how the character’s happiness is at stake
3. Intensify and build the sympathy by
1. Suspending the resolution
2. Increasing what’s at stake
3. Making the character suffer unjustly
4. Decreasing the character’s odds of obtaining happiness
5. Increasing our sympathy for the character
4. Show the character resolving the issue or playing a large role in the resolution

These conditions apply to the happiness issues along the way and the central story question. So how well does Phantom Menace create the conditions for sympathetic wahoo?

There were only two sequences in the whole of Phantom Menace that created a noticeable measure of sympathetic wahoo in me—the pod race and the battle with Darth Maul. Two sequences cannot carry a movie, not unless these sequences make up the majority of the movie. However, almost all of the sequences in Star Wars created sympathetic wahoo in me. In order to see the difference between the two, I’m going to compare the following key sequences in both movies:

• The Opening—Running from Vader versus Jedi Delegation
• The First Escape—Escaping the Droid Hunt versus Delivering Amidala
• The Coup de Grace—Blowing up the Death Star versus Blowing up the Droid Command

Phantom Menace begins by building less sympathy than Star Wars.

The opening sequence in Star Wars is the attack on the rebel ship. The ship is hopelessly small compared to the battle cruiser. The storm troopers easily overwhelm the rebel crew. Then Darth Vader walks in, lifts a man off his feet and strangles him. The bad guys are overwhelming. And who do we have opposing this juggernaut?—two droids. One’s the frightened C3PO. The other’s the brave little R2D2.

In that opening sequence we see sympathetic characters that are complete underdogs.

Compare this to the beginning of Phantom Menace. Qui-Gon and Obi-wan fly in to see the Neimoidian viceroy. The Jedi are calm and in control. The viceroy is panicked. Qui-Gon tells us these federation folk are cowards. The Neimoidian second in command "dares not go against the Jedi." The viceroy questions whether it is legal to invade Naboo. Then Sidious orders the viceroy to eliminate the Jedi. In this situation, the bad guys are the underdogs.

And what happens?

The Jedi slice and dice their way through numerous battle droids. They are still calm and in control. Then Qui-Gon stabs the blast door with his light saber. The Jedi are an overwhelming force against the Neimoidians. We feel little sympathy, only a bit of wonder and wanna.

Then the destroyer droids roll in. These pose a threat to the Jedi. But by the time the droids set up, Qui-Gon and Obi-wan are vague shadows hundreds of yards away. The destroyers look for an enemy that isn’t there.

The odds were always overwhelmingly on the side of the Jedi. And when a potential threat arose, Lucas did not suspend resolution. The result was that I felt little sympathetic stress for the Jedi. Phantom Menace failed to create sympathy because I thought it highly unlikely that the Jedi might fail. I did not feel that their survival was in jeopardy except for the fleeting moment when the destroyers rolled in.

Does this mean every movie needs to start with an escape like that in Star Wars? Of course not. It simply shows the factors in Star Wars that created sympathy in me, and the factors in Phantom Menace that dissipated my sympathy.

The next major sequence in both movies involved another escape, and again Phantom Menace did not deliver.

In Star Wars this sequence starts with Vader issuing the order to chase the escape pod. Storm troopers find the escape pod and discover that droids occupied it. The storm troopers follow the droid trail to the Jawas and waste them. The storm troopers go to Luke’s home and waste his aunt and uncle. There are none that stand before the storm troopers. The odds are very much in their favor.

Then Luke sees storm troopers stopping people in Mos Eisely. We wonder how they will avoid the checkpoint. Luke and Obi-wan are stopped by storm troopers. They are caught. But Obi-wan uses his Jedi tricks to get by. However, that doesn’t last long. Some long-nosed alien with a gas mask for a face is onto them. We see him inform the Storm Troopers. Storm troopers also come into the bar to find Obi-wan and Luke. There’s a fight. The Millennium Falcon blasts off. And we still have to fight through the destroyers, something someone else failed to do in the very beginning of the show.

Again, the odds are very much against our sympathetic characters and they continually decrease until they are very small indeed. There’s a good chance the whole crew will be caught in space with a hyper drive that failed to kick in. The resolution in all these scenes is suspended. We also have seen that Vader and the rest have terrible motives to match their terrible deeds. Everything works to build our sympathy.

Compare this to the sequence in Phantom Menace where Qui-Gon delivers Queen Amidala from the clutches of the battle droids. Once again, the Jedi team are calm and in control. They pop up in the middle of a river, a very cool visual by the way, and proceed to the Queen without much opposition. Then they travel to the hangar. They slice and dice the wimpy battle droids again and are off. And no one knows where they’ve gone. The Neimoidians are quailing. Darth Sidious is frustrated.

The odds were always in favor of the Jedi. I didn’t ever feel they were seriously threatened. The resolution of the threat is over quite quickly. What would have happened if the Neimoidians had been able to trace Qui-Gon and the queen? What would have happened if Darth Maul had followed Qui-Gon with hundreds of storm troopers? I would have had more sympathetic stress as I did in Star Wars, that’s what.

The key sequence of any story is the climax. If the climax fizzles it lowers our enjoyment of everything that went before. The climax of Star Wars rocked me. The Climax of Phantom Menace hardly stirred me. The reasons this time are that Lucas failed to pose a real threat, failed to intensify the sympathy, and failed to resolve the stress in a way that evoked emotion.

In Star Wars the Death Star is moving into position on the rebel moon. The Death Star is virtually impregnable. There’s only the smallest of chances that we can blow this thing up. It’s possible—Luke did dive-bomb swamp rats—but it’s incredibly difficult. We know going into this that Luke and company has the smallest of odds in their favor.

Then they attack. The attack consists primarily of three attempts by three different trios. Our heroes maneuver past the big guns quite easily, but then out comes Vader. The first attempt fails because Vader blows them to smithereens. The second attempt fails because it’s so difficult and because Vader blows them to smithereens. The third attempt begins just like the other two. Vader eliminates one of the trio, the other must pull out. Luke is left alone. And he retracts the targeting computer.

Notice how this sequence of Star Wars fits the conditions.

1. We’re with sympathetic Luke and the brave little R2D2
2. Luke’s LIFE is at stake as well as the lives of the only opposition to the bad guys
3. The stress is built by the following:
1. The resolution is suspended
2. The characters are threatened unjustly. The motives and actions of Vader and his cronies are evil
3. The odds in favor of the character start out small and steadily decrease
4. We find Luke more sympathetic because he’s putting his life on the line for good motives

Then Han Solo comes in and with one shot knocks Vader’s group into pieces and off Luke’s back. Even with Vader rolling off into space, we know that this is Luke’s only chance because the Death Star is, at that very moment, charging up the big gun to pulverize the rebel base.

Luke uses the force to guide him and blows the works up in a glorious shower of sparks and flame and kaboomery.

And we feel a rush.

Compare this to Anakin blowing up the Droid command and taking the viceroy. We’re told that it’s going to be a hard assignment just like in Star Wars. The Gungans have drawn off the majority of the forces. Qui-Gon & Obi-wan go to battle Maul. The Queen goes for the viceroy. And Anakin is told to stay put in the cockpit.

The Gungans start well, but are overwhelmed. Jar Jar Binks acts like an idiot and diffuses any tension that failure brings. Besides, that’s not the main attack, and they actually succeeded in their part of the strategy.

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are finally in a position where the odds are against them. Well, it starts out that way, and then they push Maul back. He’s amazingly powerful and quick. Then the odds tip against the Jedi when they get caught in the force fields. This sequence works. The odds decrease. Maul spears Qui-Gon. He knocks Obi-Wan and his weapon off the platform. The resolution is suspended. The odds are almost nil that Obi-wan will survive, but he does. Now we don’t feel all we could have because we weren’t rooting against Maul. I’ll talk about that when I discuss Maul and Vader.

The Queen goes for the viceroy and first fails and then succeeds. So there was suspension. But the viceroy was a quailing idiot, and we’ve already discovered that the battle droids were weak and ineffective. So I never felt the odds were against them. They fought a weak opponent and so my feeling of triumph was small.

And then there’s Anakin. He accidentally clears the destroyers from the hangar. He accidentally flies out into battle. He accidentally evades attackers by trying this and that, twisting this knob and that one. He accidentally lands in the hangar, a weakness in the command station that we never knew about. He accidentally hits something that results in another show of kaboomery.

Accidentally (oops, I blew it up).

And I felt hardly a thing at all.

If we just compare Anakin’s situation to the criteria, we’ll see some startling things.

Was Anakin a sympathetic character? Yes, Anakin is a good guy.

Was Anakin’s happiness threatened? Um, not really. Anakin was in danger, but there wasn’t an ace pilot with numerous kills flying on his tail. In fact, we didn’t see anyone on his tail. He was in a dangerous area, but nothing was really directed at him. Nothing that could stick.

Did the stress build? No. Blowing the command station didn’t happen all at once, but we didn’t know Anakin’s role and goal in relation to it. How do you suspend resolution if you don’t know what your character is resolving? I knew the rest of the pilots were trying to battle the command station, but Anakin was just winging all over the place with no purpose whatsoever but avoiding the enemy.

Did someone threaten Anakin unjustly? Well, only indirectly by the viceroy. But it wasn’t personal.

Did Anakin’s odds of success decrease? Well, no. We didn’t know what he was doing and all his accidents seemed to keep him perfectly safe. I can only assume Lucas was trying to show us that Anakin was so full of the midi-chlorians that he couldn’t fail no matter what. And so the odds tip very much in favor of Anakin.

Was Anakin admirable? No, he wasn’t risking life and limb because he chose to. He wasn’t making conscious choices to do the right, good, and proper thing in the face of danger.

Finally, did Anakin resolve the issue through his own efforts? Certainly. Did he mean to? Never. It was, as I pointed out, an accident.

The result was my feelings fizzled. There was no triumph. There was no joy. There was only the physical impression of the special effects.

In all three of these sequences, Phantom Menace failed to create much sympathetic wahoo in me because Lucas didn’t build the stress and/or he resolved the stress in a way that dissipated my feelings. Lucas also failed to evoke my fellow-feelings in the following sequences for the same reasons:

• Jedi and Jar Jar travel underwater
• Darth Maul hunts the Queen
• Anakin leaves his mother
• Anakin is accepted as a pupil

All of those key sequences failed in the same way. Seven key sequences that simply fizzled. Only the pod race and the battle with Darth Maul succeeded in evoking sympathetic wahoo in me.

All of this left me to question whose movie this was anyway. Is it Amidala’s or Anakin’s? In either case I could enter into their emotional world only during the pod race.

If the movie was Amidala’s, then I needed to care about her cause. I cared very little about her cause because I did not see anything to excite my sympathy. I didn’t feel loss because I never was given the chance to experience love for her people. I didn’t feel outrage because I never saw one of her people hurt. I believed Amidala felt emotion in front of the congress, but I felt nothing. I couldn’t. I had only a superficial understanding of her pain.

If this was Amidala’s movie then Lucas needed to show me the relationships Amidala cherished the most and then show me those relationships in jeopardy.

If the movie was Anakin’s then I needed to care about his issues. We are told about three issues—slavery, leaving home, and fear--but we are shown nothing that would excite any fellow feeling in us.

First, he’s a slave. He lashes out at Amidala for calling him such. But that interchange means NOTHING to us. It only touches us intellectually—oh, yeah, being a slave is a hard thing—because Lucas never shows him suffering. Anakin lives, in Jar Jar’s words, a "cozy" home. He plays with friends. He builds cool droids and pod racers. He looks healthy. His master treats him no worse than many people are treated on a regular job.

Calling someone a slave doesn’t make us feel sympathy. We feel sympathy when we see him suffer in situations as a slave.

Second, Anakin is supposed to have a hard time leaving home. Well, I didn’t feel that difficulty because I didn’t feel his mother was vital to his happiness. I needed something more than the label of mother to convince me that leaving a place that looks like Phoenix, Arizona and becoming a Jedi was a hard thing to do.

Third, Anakin is scared. But of what? For whom? Does anyone KNOW? It can’t be for his mother. She was not threatened in any way. There was no sign of the usual mistreatment of slaves. None of Anakin’s buddies are threatened. No one is after Anakin. What bad thing is going to happen?

This seems to be an important part of the whole Anakin story. Yoda goes on and on about how this fear will take him to hate and suffering. I suppose this is the seed that will turn him into Darth Vader. But I never see what there is to fear. I never feel it. Perhaps if I had the force I would have, but for those of us whose midi-chlorian count doesn’t even register, we had to simply believe the idea of it.

Again and again Lucas tells us about a feeling, but doesn’t provide us the situations that would evoke our fellow feelings.

Lucas failed in the same way with Darth Maul. An antagonist is someone we should fear and hate. At least that’s how we’ve felt in previous Star Wars movies. We feared and hated Vader. But I did not fear and hate Maul, not very much.

Why?

I think it’s because Maul wasn’t much more than an idea of evil.

In Star Wars, Vader talks, he strangles an enemy commander, chokes a fellow general, tortures a princess, blows up a planet full of innocent people, kills good old Ben Kenobi, and wastes half of the attack force. Vader provides us plenty of situations to judge his character and let us see him as more than an image. He’s a bad guy because he does a LOT of bad things. Sure he looks and sounds evil and cold in his suit, but that isn’t what’s important. Vader SHOWS us he’s evil.

Maul, on the other hand, doesn’t provide us with anything but a few visual impressions. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t choke anyone. He doesn’t sexually harass his secretary. He’s barely on stage. In the end he fights like a dream, full of grace and beauty. He paces for a moment like a tiger in a cage. Then he’s gone.

We never had any strong basis to hate or fear him. I figure he’d dust Darth Vader in a Sith duel. But as an antagonist, he’s nothing compared to Vader. He never exhibited injustice because we never knew his motives. He was only a graceful and cool threat.

It’s one thing to point out what went wrong with Phantom Menace. It’s quite another to suggest ways Lucas could have changed things to produce more sympathetic wahoo. I shared my thoughts on wahoo with a friend of mine named Jason Smith, and he came up with a number of plot changes I feel would have produced more wahoo in me. I borrowed some of his ideas and I added a few of my own. I’ve listed what I felt were the seven best ideas below. When reading these, remember all the cool stuff created for Phantom Menace, then imagine what you would have felt if Lucas had made one or more of the following changes:

1. Instead of Anakin wanting to be a Jedi (Yipee!), Anakin is forced to leave. Qui-Gon wants to kill him because the dark side knows about the boy. The Jedi won’t train him. They can’t let the Sith get him--he poses such a huge danger. But Obi-Wan wants to train him. Obi-Wan buys the boy against his mother's will and takes him.
2. Instead of Anakin having a cozy home, droids to work on, and a fairly nice master, Anakin is beaten by other slaves, or gangs, or tormented by some bad Lucas ghoolie (maybe show us how Sebulba tried to kill him in other pod races).
3. Instead of Anakin coming to the attention of the bad guys only at the end, Anakin is befriended or rescued by Darth Maul from a dangerous situation (the ghoolie or the gangs that torment Anakin). Darth Maul tests his blood and decides he wants the boy as HIS apprentice.
4. Instead of Darth Maul showing up only for the last sequence, Darth Maul is with the viceroy in the beginning. He almost kills Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. They escape, but he’s hot on their tail. The Jedi have to sneak around Mos Eisely.
5. Instead of having a ho-hum mother, Anakin has a mother who fights for him. Defends him against a gang and brings the wrath of the community on Watto. He is about to punish her brutally, but Anakin tells him he won’t race for him if he does, so Watto relents. But when Anakin leaves there’s nothing to stop Watto from tormenting his mother.
6. Instead of Jar Jar Binks functioning only as a sideshow idiot, Jar Jar’s story begins when he’s thrown out of the Gungan spy organization--he bumbled too many times. He hooks up with the Jedi. Volunteers to "help." Provides us with all the sight gags as he tries to sneak and fails. In the end, he succeeds in proving himself on the battlefield. He sneaks behind enemy lines, gets into a tank, blasts the droids, and then wreaks havoc among the droid troops. His heroism draws much of the droid army after him and lets many of his compadres escape.
7. Instead of ACCIDENTALLY blowing up the droid command, Anakin rides co-pilot with Obi-Wan. He rides with Obi-Wan to keep him safe from Maul and Qui-Gon. Then Anakin plays a crucial role in helping Obi-Wan blow the droid command up.

Perhaps some of these didn’t wahoo you. That’s fine. I’m sure you could have thought up others that would. The point was to show that many things could have been done to allow us to feel the wahoo. Lucas could have come up with ideas similar to or better than these.

Was this a one-time slip? Was this simply a situation where Lucas laid a teradactyl of an egg with Phantom Menace, but will go on to write and produce better movies later? Lucas did provide lots of wonder. But wonder doesn’t satisfy. Wonder is the ketchup and mustard. sympathetic wahoo and curiosity are the beef patty.

I fear Lucas will continue to offer me gutted hamburgers in the future. Not only did Phantom Menace fail, but Lucas also intentionally went back and "improved" Star Wars. He added and updated a lot of effects. Effects are not bad. I love good effects. But in one sequence he intentionally traded effects for sympathetic wahoo. He made the trade because he thought it made a better movie. Maybe for him it was. But for me, effects are the side dish, not the main course.

The sequence he changed is the one when Luke and Obi-Wan drive into the port city. In the old version they see storm troopers stopping people. We know Luke and Ben can’t escape. The resolution is suspended. The storm troopers stop them. And then Ben does his mind tricks. That was a scene of great tension for me.

In the new version Lucas cuts everything but the very ending where Ben does his mind tricks. All the sympathetic stress is gone. There was no suspension of resolution. There was no building of stress, no seeing the storm troopers and knowing our duo can’t get past them. I barely had time to figure out what was going on. And what did I get in return?—the hind-end of some dinosaur looking creature.

This is truly a bad omen because if he thought this was BETTER, then he probably thinks he did nothing wrong with Phantom Menace. And if he thinks that, well, I cannot expect much sympathetic wahoo in future movies. Sure, I go to Star Wars movies for wonder. But wonder, without sympathetic wahoo, is boring.

I know many people did not have my experience. Many boys in my Sunday school class loved Jar Jar Binks, felt loads of sympathetic wahoo, and never once were bumped out of the story. Their experience is just as valid as mine. Lucas succeeded in producing the effects in that audience and failed with me.

Perhaps he intended the movie for that younger audience. We shall see. There is a chance he’ll provide me with the effects of Star Wars again. The resolution is suspended. The odds are against him. I hope he resolves this dilemma with plenty of wahoo.

The first step in the story development process is to determine the effects we’re after. The last step in the story development process is to gather feedback on the effects the story produced. The Thrill-O-Meter is one way to gather and categorize those effects. The meter’s job is not to explain why and how those effects were created. Its only function is to provide feedback and help me clarify what I experienced.

There are three primary conditions and six effects that delight. You might have your own list of effects, but I think these are representative of a vast majority of what we go to movies for. These nine effects are:

These primary conditions must be met before the audience can experience much of the six main story effects.

These are the effects we like. This is what we want to feel. We don’t feel the same amount in every movie. We don’t expect to. But if we don’t feel the effects we EXPECTED to feel, well, then a movie is a dud. It didn’t work. The effects it then produces are disappointment, irritation, or even anger.

Here’s a reading of my experience with Star Wars and Phantom Menace. I rate my reaction on a scale of one to five stars. Blue stars signify Star Wars. Red stars signify Phantom Menace.

Stories present us a series of situations that are comprised of characters, setting, and events. If I can understand the characters, their motives, speech, and actions, if I can understand the setting, if I can understand what’s going on, then the story is clear.

Here’s how Star Wars and Phantom Menace came across to me.

The only thing that wasn’t crystal clear was Jar Jar Binks. A lot of what he said I simply did not understand until I watched the movie the second time.

In order for me to feel any of the major story effects, I must believe the situation is true, or I must be able to imagine it’s true. In either case, I’m not an observer or critic--I’m involved in the events. I have to make the jump from observation to involvement. If I don’t, I won’t feel the effects. It’s that simple.

Many things affect my involvement. As the events occur, I’ll judge a character’s motives, decisions, abilities, speech, and actions by what I think is within the rules of the world presented me. I’ll judge the setting, checking for anachronisms, facts, and consistency. And if something is screwy, I’ll think of the storyteller instead of the story.

Here’s how well Star Wars and Phantom Menace involved me in the events of the story.

Phantom Menace prevented me from totally enrolling myself in the story. I didn’t believe Anakin’s crisis. I didn’t believe the language of many of the characters. I also did not believe the setting of the congress; I have tried to moderate large groups and I cannot imagine moderating a debate of thousands of participants the way they did. The floating platforms were cool, but I couldn’t imagine it as anything but a voting only situation.

Trust involves two things. First, I trust someone when I feel safe with him or her. Trustworthy people will not do me physical, emotional, or spiritual harm. They’re not going to take advantage of me. They’re not going to promote things that I see as damaging or hurtful to others or myself. Second, I trust someone when I believe the person can and will keep his or her promises to me.

So storytellers have my trust when I feel their stories will not damage me. For example, I feel watching pornography will damage me spiritually and emotionally. If a storyteller constantly offers that to me, I will not feel that storyteller has my best interest at heart. I won’t trust him. I also will not trust storytellers if I feel the values and beliefs they espouse are harmful to others. Perhaps I feel they support some form of racism or promote violence. I’ll argue with them in my mind as the story unfolds. I may walk out. The point is that whenever I feel the author is promoting hurtful things, I’m will stop involving myself in the story events and start to defend myself or attack the author.

Of course, what an author believes and what the characters in the story believe are often different. Furthermore, I might not "get" the author’s intent. But whether the audience gets the author’s true feelings doesn’t matter. If the audience perceives the author posing dangerous values or beliefs, they pull out of the experience.

Now I must also believe a storyteller will fulfill my expectations. Whether the perceived promise is explicit or tacit doesn’t matter. If I don’t trust an author is going to deliver--perhaps the author’s stories have been inconsistent in the past or the author doesn’t handle the medium credibly--then it takes more to move me from being the critic or observer to being involved.

Here’s the trust I felt for George Lucas in Star Wars and Phantom Menace.

I felt safe with George Lucas and the values presented in Phantom Menace. I trusted he would come through. Orson Card, on the other hand, felt Lucas promoted values that harm others. I did not have this reaction. I still don’t. Maybe I’m an imperialist and can’t feel it.

This is the king of movie effects. Sympathetic wahoo is the bundle of emotions we experience that center around a sympathetic character, the situations they’re in, and how they work towards happiness. There’s a dark side and a light side. We cannot feel one without the other. Your list of sympathetic emotions might differ from mine. The point is we almost always expect some type of sympathetic emotion from a story. Those stories that produce a lot of that emotion are the "great" stories.

Here are the feelings Star Wars and Phantom Menace evoked in me.

I felt relief from stress all throughout Star Wars. I felt stress in only two sequences in Phantom Menace, so I could not feel much relief. I felt loads of triumph when the Death Star blew. I felt nothing at the end of Phantom Menace. I was thankful to Han Solo in Star Wars. I was thankful to none in Phantom Menace. I was sad about R2 being "killed" in Star Wars. I felt a moment of regret for Qui-Gon’s death in Phantom Menace. Phantom Menace just didn’t help me feel much sympathetic wahoo.

This is the queen of movie effects. Curiosity is woven through the whole fabric of story. Anything that produces a question raises our curiosity. Here are some examples of the many things that raise our curiosity.

• Sympathetic wahoo begins by raising a question about the happiness of our characters
• New settings or characters can raise a question about what this new place or person is like
• Issues raise questions about what is right
• Things forbidden, secret, or hidden raise questions
• Puzzles are questions

Sometimes the author will explicitly state a question. Whatever the source, once the audience feels curiosity, it acts much like sympathetic wahoo. The author builds our curiosity by withholding the answer, by suspending resolution. During that suspension the author takes us through a number of attempts to answer the question. If we’re curious about a setting, then the author can take us from place to place. If we’re trying to figure out a mystery, the author will reveal clue after clue. In such cases the audience feels the odds of answering the question drop. Eventually, the author resolves the curiosity. The longer the build and more hopeless the audience feels at finding an answer, the bigger the rush the audience feels when the question is solved if the resolution is unexpected.

If the author raises our curiosity about something very important, something central, then we are driven to find it out. This is one of the large effects X-files created in us. This is the heart of the story for many novels and movies.

Here’s a reading of the curiosity I felt in Star Wars and Phantom Menace.

In Phantom Menace I was curious about the main plot questions. However, the curiosity did not turn into wahoo in most cases. I didn’t find many of the characters intriguing. Qui-Gon is the only one I was curious about. The setting was full of wonder. I wanted very much to see what it was all like.

Wanna is the desire of the audience to be in the situation the character is in. I wanna do that. I wanna be like her. I wanna go to those places. I wanna have that gizmo. It’s related to wonder. First we feel wonder, a feeling of "cool!" Then in certain cases we wanna experience that wonder first hand.

Here’s the wanna that Star Wars and Phantom Menace produced in me.

Both movies produced desirable situations for me. I like fights, sneaking, finding cool places, learning ancient powers, flying fast vehicles, and swordplay (of course, each target audience will want different things in those five categories; I feel the author needs to identify those wannas to be successful). I would have loved to visit Coruscant. I don’t think I’d want to face off Darth Maul, hence the three stars, but I would have loved to see all those aliens. I wanted all the technology in both movies. I wanted to be like Luke because he had the force. I felt that same want in Phantom Menace to be like Qui-Gon.

We experience wonder when we discover something new. It might be a stunning visual, an incredible soundtrack, a fascinating place, or an incredible use of the medium. As stated above, Wanna and Curiosity often follow Wonder.

Here is the wonder that Star Wars and Phantom Menace produced in me.

Both movies provided tons of wonder. Star Wars had weird creatures. Phantom Menace had weird creatures. Star Wars had cool toys like the land cruiser. Phantom Menace had the pods. Star Wars introduced the strange armor of the Empire. Phantom Menace had Queen Amidala’s ever-changing coif. The events were new and spectacular. In both movies I was constantly thinking: wow, cool, would ya look at that. The only thing both movies didn’t provide was a style that drew attention to itself. That’s not a bad or good thing. It’s a nice side dish for me, but I can take it or leave it. It’s not the main course.

I don’t think humor needs much explaining. I laugh or I don’t. I could rate humor by type, but that’s beyond me right now. Instead, I’ll slice and dice the information by the intensity of my reaction.

Here’s the humor Star Wars and Phantom Menace produced in me.

I enjoyed the C3PO-R2 and Han-Leia interactions immensely. The "humorous situations" in Phantom Menace actually produced irritation in me.

Stories offer us insights about many things. For me it seems the insights I glean come in two categories—values & beliefs or facts. In both cases when I receive insight I make new connections.

Values and beliefs are principles I believe people need to live by to be happy. For example, when I watched Les Miserable with Anthony Perkins I felt I received a great insight about forgiving others. I often feel a need to do something when I receive this kind of insight.

Facts, on the other hand, don’t produce that need. A fact can be something important like knowing how virus spread to something unimportant like what jambalaya is. I learn something new, feel the aha, and move on. Facts are usually based on the setting.

Here’s the amount of insight I received from Star Wars and Phantom Menace.

Neither movie provided any revelation about life to me. The closest either film came was when Yoda ran through his litany of fear leads to suffering, but I didn’t quite buy all the connections in that string of logic.

This is the map of Brainland and a brief explanation of the terrain.

Brainland maps the effects movies give us. Imagine the trails as neural pathways to feeling centers. What flies along those pathways are brain juices. What happens is this. We perceive a situation. We try to make sense of it. This all happens at brain speed. And then certain feeling centers are aroused or stimulated. We may stimulate a number of feeling centers at the same time.

I see two divisions in the effects movies produce. There are those in The Bog of Boredom and Irritation and those in The Forest of Delights.

In the bog we have those effects that arise from things that prevent us from receiving the message—confusion, unbelief, mistrust--and those that we experience after we receive the message—boredom and dumbness. All of these may be slight or strong enough to induce resentment and anger.

In the Forest of Delights we have those effects which are centrally related to story—sympathetic wahoo and curiosity--and those that are not.

There are three primary conditions for getting to the forest of delights.

First, most of the feelings we go to movies for require that we understand specific things about a character and her situation. We need to understand the actions, dialogue, events, and motivations because it is these things that stimulate our feeling centers.

Second, we need to believe in the character and situations because if we don’t, the movie doesn’t engage our sympathy. And a majority of the feelings movies produce in us require sympathy to work.

Finally, we must trust the author. If at any time we take offense or begin to dislike the implied author, we will stop listening and start forming our objections, looking for ways to defend ourselves, or attack the author. If the story is unclear, unbelievable, or if the author can’t be trusted, we stop receiving the service. And when we stop receiving the service, there’s no way the story can stimulate the intended effects.

I began to explicitly look at stories through the lens of business almost two years ago. One of the key principles of business is simply that customers buy products and services because they want specific things. It’s the provider’s responsibility to define the target market and that market’s wants.

That’s basic common sense. But I’d never really focused that perspective on stories before. Perhaps it was all the time I spent in English literature classes that blinded me, but I had never really defined for myself why I consumed stories. As someone who wants to write powerful stories, not knowing this was akin to a Nike not knowing why people use shoes or Ford not knowing why people want trucks. Without doing market research I’m more likely to create duds than anything else.

About six months after I began to look at stories this way, I attended a workshop that Dave Wolverton gave. He began that workshop talking about this very thing—why people consume stories. That workshop was enlightening. One key concept I took away from those sessions was that successful authors meet the desires of a large audience. They can do this by accident. Or they can study it out and do it on purpose. If they do it on purpose, they’re likely to do it again.

The process of product development has been around for quite some time. Here’s how I apply it to story writing:

1. Define what jazzes me about stories
2. Define a target audience that I could appeal to with the effects I enjoy
3. Understand how the effects work; this may include bench marking and reverse engineering
4. Write my story
5. Gather feedback to see if my story produced the intended effects

This process helps the author focus on the purpose and customer of his or her story. I don’t think this limits creativity. It only directs it.

Our stories will produce effects no matter what we do. The question is not whether we produce effects. The question is whether we will try to communicate. Stories communicate facts, but their real power is in communicating emotions, values, and beliefs.

So a storyteller can babble her emotions and values, writing with passion but ignoring the effects her stories produce. Or she can speak with passion and try to communicate the emotion and effect of people facing life’s struggles or just plain having fun. In the first instance she’s focused on herself, on making a display. In the second instance she’s focused on others. I believe the latter will prove to be much more satisfying to both the storyteller and the audience.