How including value changes will improve your writing exponentially
by Vic Shayne, NY Times bestselling author
This is the first in a series of articles I am writing about writing. It seems everyone is doing this, so I hope I have something that will be useful to you. It’s not that I am special or more accomplished than anyone else, but perhaps you can find some value in some of my observations about scripts and books that go awry due to an overlooked technicality.
I have been writing for more than 40 years. I was graduated from Journalism college in 1978 and I think I was given some good instruction. However, the instruction was nowhere near enough to make me a good writer. This is something you either have or you don’t. But even if you do, it helps to have some insight into formula so you create a good story that’s both inviting and compelling. This is where it seems so much goes wrong.
Let’s look at something called the “value change.” It’s one of many devices that are needed in a compelling piece of work, whether you’re writing a documentary, a biography, or a novel.
The idea of the value change came to me through a great book called Story, by Robert McKee. The book is the most valuable source I have ever read on writing. Although it is primarily about screenwriting, the principles hold true for all sorts of writing and forever changed the quality of my work.
Fortunately, I learned about value changes right before I wrote Remember Us — a biography on a Holocaust survivor. Although the protagonist of the book had an amazing story, without the value changes I don’t think it would have been compelling enough to have won me an agent and publisher, let alone the ability to get the book onto several bestsellers lists.
A value change, the way I understand it, is when you play with the opposing forces of the story. One moment things are looking up, and in another moment they are looking down. One chapter starts off with the protagonist in a horrible fix, and by its end she may see the light of day. The idea is as old as stories themselves.
Cliff-hangers of Hollywoodland
When I was a boy I used to be a big fan of silent films — movies made before and around 1920, when Hollywood was Hollywoodland and Buster Keaton was figuring out how to have a building fall down around him without killing him in the process. One of the biggest box office draws in this early period were called cliff-hangers. These were films in which the hero or heroine was left hanging on the edge of a cliff or tied to a railroad track just as the movie ended. The audience just had to come back next week to find out what was going to happen. Predictably, in the subsequent movie the protagonist was rescued or managed to escape just in the nick of time and then go on to new adventures until the value changed once again at the end of the film. At that point, once again, he found himself tied to a tree about to be killed by headhunters, a mangy lion, or some such menacing thing.
Value changes have of course become much more sophisticated in modern movies and books, but the idea remains the same — the hero gets into trouble and then has to get out of it. Or he is walking along minding his own business and then is suddenly chased down the block by a lunatic with a meat cleaver.
Quite often people pick up a book and then put it down after a chapter or two, never to read any more of it. Or they watch a film and find it drab, boring, and uninteresting. One possible problem may be that the writer failed to create timely and poignant value changes.
You know what value changes are
Life is full of value changes. We go through them all the time. Usually we complain about them. One day you wake up feeling wonderful and then you get really bad news that sends you into a depression so bad that you want to jump off a bridge. Maybe the IRS sent you a letter that you owe $12,422. Three hours later your accountant returns your panicky call and tells you that the news really isn’t that bad because he took care of that nonsense three months ago. Now you are happy again and take the whole family out for pizza. Then you get the bill and find out you left your wallet at home. Will the management be understanding or will the management be mean and call the cops on you? What will you do next? The answer to this will be the next value change.
One thing that I learned about value changes is that it helps to alter the value chapter by chapter, regardless of whether your work is fiction or nonfiction, a biography or a novel. One chapter starts off high and ends up low; then the next one starts off low and ends up high. The idea is to propel the story along and engage the reader so she just has to know what happens next. If you have ever binge-watched a really good series then you have been hooked on really good value changes.
