The action of your story must change your hero. Action by itself can grab an audience’s attention but how it affects your hero is the real story.
(*** Spoiler alert for “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” and “These Final Hours” ***)
In “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things”, a young man finds he’s trapped in a time loop and doesn’t understand why. He goes through each day trying to meet a girl and fails each time. That’s when he finally meets a different girl who seems to be the only other person he’s ever met who’s also aware that they’re trapped in a time loop.
Time loop stories are fairly common (“Groundhog Day”, “Palm Springs”, and “Happy Death Day”) but what sets “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” apart is the reason why the hero (the young man) is trapped in a time loop.
It’s because as he gets to know and fall in love with the girl who’s also aware that she’s trapped in a time loop that he learns why he’s trapped in a time loop. The girl’s mother is dying and the girl is unable to let go. Therefore she’s somehow triggered the time loop.
So “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” may seem like another time loop movie, but it’s really about how painful it can be to lose someone and not be willing to let them go. The only way the girl and the young man can escape the time loop is for the girl to say her final good-bye to her mother and embrace her new relationship with the hero.
“The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” is about letting go of the past so you can embrace the challenges and uncertainty of the new. Until you let go of the past, you can’t move forward towards the future.
That deeper meaning gives the action of “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” a stronger emotional impact than just the action and challenge of being stuck in a time loop by itself.
Watch the trailer for “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” here.
The action of your story must always force your hero to change in a meaningful, emotional way. In “These Final Hours”, a meteor crashes into the Atlantic Ocean and the shock waves decimate all life in its path. The last country left alive is Australia, but they only have a few hours left before the shock wave reaches their country and kills everyone there.
By itself, the action in “These Final Hours” could be an interesting end of the world story, but what gives this story meaning is how it changes the hero. On the day everyone in Australia realizes they’re doomed, the hero’s girlfriend reveals she’s pregnant. The hero and his girlfriend both know their child doesn’t have a chance and this causes the hero to leave his girlfriend in despair.
As he wanders around, he rescues a young girl from two would-be rapists. Now his entire goal is to get this young girl back to her family. In the process of doing so, the hero learns what type of father he would have been and he realizes he would have been a good father.
Now knowing this, he rushes back to his girlfriend to spend the last hour with her. Even though both know they will die, the hero takes comfort in knowing he would have been a good father and by spending his last hour with his girlfriend, he shows he loves her.
Watch the trailer for “These Final Hours” here.
Strip away the hero’s emotional change in both stories and you’re left with interesting action that has no focus, direction or purpose. Add emotional meaning to action and suddenly you’ve got a deeper, richer story that’s more than special effects, car crashes, and gunfire. A story with meaning will always be more compelling than a story loaded with acton that lacks any meaning whatsoever (ie. “Borderlands”).
So when writing your own story, come up with action that’s interesting, but also make sure your story’s action changes your hero emotionally because that’s the real key to telling a great story.
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