What Keeps the Story Moving?
The story engine is the fundamental concept that powers a narrative and ensures it has the potential to keep going. It is the central, dynamic conflict that can be relied upon to create new and interesting problems for the characters to solve. A story with a weak engine will quickly run out of steam, feeling episodic or directionless. A story with a strong engine has a built-in mechanism for generating compelling scenes and escalating stakes. The engine is the answer to the question, “What is this story’s core activity?”
This concept is especially critical for television series, which need an engine robust enough to generate stories for dozens or even hundreds of episodes. A show like House M.D. has a powerful engine: ‘A brilliant but misanthropic doctor solves a new, baffling medical mystery each week, creating conflict with his patients and colleagues.’ This premise can be repeated indefinitely with new variations. However, the concept is just as vital for a feature film, providing the narrative with a clear and sustainable source of conflict for its two-hour runtime.
Components of a Strong Story Engine
A powerful story engine is typically born from the collision of a few key elements.
- A Protagonist with a Strong, Ongoing Goal: The hero must want something desperately. This goal provides the initial forward momentum.
- A Powerful Antagonistic Force or Situation: There must be a significant and persistent obstacle standing in the way of that goal.
- A Central Irony or Contradiction: The most powerful engines have a delicious irony at their core. The conflict is not just a simple chase, but a complex, often paradoxical, situation.
Examples of Story Engines in Film:
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The Fugitive (1993): The engine is: ‘An innocent man, wrongly convicted of murder, must hunt for the real killer while simultaneously being hunted by a relentless U.S. Marshal.’ This engine is brilliant because it has two opposing forces (the hunt for the killer vs. the hunt for the fugitive) that are guaranteed to create suspense, close calls, and investigative scenes.
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Jaws (1975): The engine is: ‘A police chief with a crippling fear of water must go out onto the open ocean to hunt a giant, man-eating shark.’ The central irony of a water-phobic man being forced to fight a sea monster generates both the film’s external conflict and its main character’s internal arc.
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Groundhog Day (1993): The engine is: ‘A cynical, selfish man is trapped in a time loop, forced to repeat the same day forever until he learns to be a better person.’ This is a perfect story engine because it provides an endless opportunity for comedic and dramatic variation, while being directly tied to the protagonist’s character transformation.