What Shrek can teach us about good storytelling and the meaning of life
What makes a good plot
A physicist named David Deutsch said that a good plot is a series of good explanations for why and how events happen, given fictional premises.
Another way to frame that is that a good plot is like a Rube Goldberg machine. You accept that the author set up the initial conditions, setting up a situation with tension and potential energy, and gave it an initial push. After that, everything just plays out on its own. No one would accept a Rube Goldberg machine with multiple steps where the creator steps in from out of frame to knock over an extra domino or put their thumb on a scale. Just like no one would accept a book where the author randomly said “this doesn’t really make sense but I’m going to make it happen anyway because it’s needed for the plot”.
This is why people hate when characters miscommunicate in a contrived way. It requires an unnatural coincidence for the male lead to overhear the female lead saying “I hate him” (referring to her math teacher or some other irrelevant third party), and then for the male lead to assume she’s talking about him in particular and then cut her out of his life before she has a chance to explain herself. That requires a too much of happenstance and stupidity, and is too convenient for the plot.
But this tendency for miscommunciations to be frustrating doesn’t mean that all miscommunications in media are bad. They are totally acceptable if they are well-foreshadowed and feel like what the characters would naturally do.
An example is in the first Shrek movie, possibly the most over-analyzed movie of all time. It’s about two people who are both insecure for the same thing—Shrek and Fiona are both ogres, except Fiona is only an ogre at night and hides it so Shrek doesn’t know. Both think that this makes them unlovable but both desperately want love. This is established from the beginning, with Fiona being locked in a tower for her condition, and Shrek spending all his time hiding in a swamp and pretending to be happy in his home.
Then Shrek overhears Fiona saying, “Who could ever love a beast so hideous and ugly,” and thinks she’s talking about him. Unlike the example I made up before though, in Shrek it doesn’t feel contrived at all.
Fiona has an logical reason for hiding the truth from from him, so it makes sense that a miscommunication would happen. And Shrek storms away before she has a chance to explain, but the movie has already spent a lot of time establishing that he has a tendency to push people out of his life, so it feels natural. And fundamentally, it is a miscommunication that comes directly from both characters’ flaws and unmet needs. It is born from an insecurity that both characters have been established as having from the beginning.
Of course, this makes the climax that much better. Which brings me to the next point of what makes a good story.
What makes a good story
I think one thing everyone wonders about, consciously or unconsciously, is how to live a good life.
One thing that happens in most good stories is that the main character has some flaw or misconception that’s preventing them from living a good life. If it’s a flaw that reminds the viewer of themselves, they instinctively pay attention. They sense that the story may contain information useful to them.
In the case of Shrek, the flaw is that the characters think they’re unworthy of love because of their appearance. This is a thought that is relatable to many people. The society in the movie has taught them to be ashamed of themselves and to hide because of their appearance, but by the end of the movie, they fall in love with one another. And they each realize that if they can love the other, then they must deserve love too.
She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by—
And never knew.
– Shel Silverstein
Of course, this is just a random story some guy made up. Why would anyone expect to get useful information from it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to get that from scientific studies where someone surveys people about their choices and then measures how good their lives are?
Well, this might seem like a reach, but think about it: why did anyone expect to get any useful information from Newton’s theory of gravity or Einstein’s theory of relativity? After all, the theory is just something some guy made up while sitting in his house. And neither really collected any new experimental evidence that no one knew about before. In that way, those theories are like Shrek, just a nice story.
But this is one of the biggest misconceptions about science. We usually already have all the evidence we could ever need. With Newton, we already knew a bit about the motion of the moon and how fast apples fall. With Einstein, we already knew about the precession of Mercury and various strange phenomena involving the speed of light.
We had the evidence, we just didn’t yet know the theory that explained the evidence well. Once you hear the theory that elegantly predicts the motion of the planets with the same equation that predicts how an apple will fall from a tree, you know there’s something to it. Identifying the theory that explains the evidence is the hard part, not actually collecting the evidence.
Just like those scientific theories seem obviously close to the truth once we know them, the things a movie like Shrek has to say about living a good life can seem obviously close to the truth once we hear what it has to say.
Now that brings up another question. Why do people like to get this information in the form of stories? Wouldn’t a few sentences accomplish the goal just as well? My answer is that it could, and that’s why people like motivational quotes and self-help books and inspiring Tumblr screenshots. But a story has characters, which humans instinctively connect to, which makes the message more persuasive than an abstract quote. It feels less like some guy’s hot take and more like a real thing that actually happened that you can learn from.
And that’s part of why it can’t feel like the author is unrealistically causing events to happen a certain way. If it feels like that, the story stops feeling intuitively like a real thing that could actually happen (given fictional premises). It goes back to feeling like some guy’s hot take. You see the author too clearly instead of seeing the characters.
A story has many other things that make it entertaining as well. What I mention is just one thing that people want to get from a story. People also want to laugh and have their minds blown by plot twists and see hot people walk through a hallway while beating people up. They want to see the good guys win and the bad guys lose and the leads finally kiss and the main character go from childhood to adulthood.
But the “how to live a good life” angle is attractive to me because it seems the hardest one of all. As the author of the story with a goal like that, you truly need to have something to say. And you can’t really just copy someone else, because if someone else made a movie with Shrek’s message now it would seem a lot less original and a lot more boring. You just need to try to figure life out for yourself, before you can write a story that teaches it to others.
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