“Tell to Win” by Peter Guber (Part 3)

I’m enjoying “Tell to Win,” a book that’s just come out from Peter Guber, the former chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures and current head of Mandalay Entertainment Group. The lowdown on the book:

In Tell To Win, executive and entrepreneur Peter Guber shows how to move beyond soulless PowerPoint slides, facts, and figure to create purposeful stories that can motivate, win over, shape, engage, and sell. To validate the power of telling purposeful stories, he includes a remarkably diverse number of “voices” — master tellers with whom he has shared experiences. They include YouTube founder Chad Hurley, NBA champion Pat Riley, film director Steven Spielberg, and physician and author Deepak Chopra.

While pitched to people in the business community, I’m finding there’s a lot here for those of us interested in screenwriting and a career in movies, so I thought it would be worth sharing a few of those insights in some posts over the next week or so.

Today: Backstory.

Perhaps the last thing I expected when I started reading “Tell to Win” was a deep insight into the screenwriting process, but I got one from Guber’s ruminations about the idea of backstories and his discussion with Deepak Chopra:

“Deepak is a practitioner of narrative medicine. This approach to treatment, now gaining ground throughout mainstream medicine, is based on scientific evidence that backstories affect and afflict everyone’s life. For better or worse, Deepak told us, they’re always there. And because of that, story tellers need to pay close attention not only to their own backstories, but also to their listeners’.

Backstories, he explained, emerge out of our memories of past experiences, imagination, and desire. ‘You create stories around these thoughts. Then you live out those stories and you call it life.’

…negative memories… can overwhelm the power of imagination and even the desire for a happy ending. ‘What makes a person extraordinary,’ he said, ‘is that he or she finds a way to tell a new story.’ This doesn’t mean changing the experience on which the story is based. It means mentally creating a new context and a new meaning that breaks the pattern and hold of the backstory. The new story then serves as ‘a bridge from what is to what could be.’”

There’s doubtless value in applying this concept to our own lives, but what struck me was a different understanding of backstory as it relates to the characters in our stories.

I have always thought of backstory — the life of characters before we type FADE IN — as an accumulation of events in a character’s past. By digging into those events, we come to understand the character — their wants, needs, fears, hopes, dreams, world view, etc. But backstory as Chopra describes is not just neutral value. A character’s backstory holds a claim upon that character. If we think of this specifically in terms of a Protagonist, we get into my idea of story as psychological journey and a fundamental question every writer should ask:

Why does this story have to happen to this character (Protagonist) at this time?

One answer: Precisely in order for them to break loose of the constraints of their backstory and create a new story through the experiences the Protagonist has in Act Two and Act Three.

Just as Joseph Campbell talked about the Hero starting out in The Ordinary World, we can think of that as their Backstory Experience. Something happens which causes the Protagonist to depart The Ordinary World and venture into the New World what we can call the New Story Experience.

Or to look at it from a Jungian perspective, a Protagonist’s backstory has enabled them to create a set of coping skills, defense mechanisms, and beliefs which constitutes the experience of their life. But in so doing, they have also cut themselves off from key aspects of their psyche, most especially their shadow. Jung claims the process of individuation is about getting in touch with and understanding all aspects of our psyche. If we don’t do that, the universe creates circumstances which force us to. Therefore our backstory while having some positive attributes is also a negative in that it keeps us from entering more deeply into our Self. Again something happens. And off the Protagonist goes on their adventure, along the way creating a New Story Experience based upon interactions with characters who compel the Protagonist to engage key aspects of their own psyche.

That metamorphosis process we see over and over in movies is, as Chopra suggests, “a bridge from what is to what could be.”

So backstory is not just a compilation of events we uncover about our characters. It is also a power that has a kind of grip on each character. In essence the story we write shakes loose the grip of the Protagonist’s backstory causing them to create a New Paradigm.

Or to really distill the point: Movies are about characters moving from the experience of their backstory into a new story.

For Part One of my series on Guber’s book “Tell to Win,” go here.

For Part Two, go here.