Often the B Story is the “love” story
and the person to whom our hero will confide what’s
happening. The classic “B Story” usually begins when
the hero proactively enters Act Two, turns left, looks across a
crowded room, and there she is! She’s not only a guide, but
the girl he’ll fall in love with! It doesn’t have to be
a girl — or a guy — it can be a Mentor, or a bunch of
new characters that will help the hero understand this strange new
place. That person or persons who assist the hero, and teach him
the lesson of the journey, is the B Story.
Yes, there is a
connection between Theme and B Story! I call it the “helper
story” because it helps
the hero understand what his adventure is really
about.
As suggested above, most movies have two
intertwining skeins:
-
The A Story is the hero’s tangible goal, what he
wants.
-
The B Story is the hero’s spiritual
goal, what he needs.
The A
Story is what is happening on the surface. It’s the
plot. The
B Story, or what I call the “helper story,”
helps push the hero to learn the spiritual lesson that every story
is really all about. Most often the B Story is “the love
interest” aka “the girl.” The hero enters the
upside-down version of the world of Act Two, looks across a crowded
room, and there she is — the person who’ll help him on
his way to transformation, and hold his hand as he dies and is
reborn! And, of course, because she can’t be with him when
they meet (otherwise where’d we have to go?), the process of
boy wins girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back in a poker game,
is seen time and again in a thousand forms. “The girl”
can also be “the mentor.”
Example: check out the B Story of the hit comedy
Dodgeball: A True Underdog
Story. Who’s the B
Story? Who’s the “helper” character that will
push hero Vince Vaughn to learn his lesson in leadership? Why
it’s Rip Torn, as down-and-out ex-dodgeball champ, Patches
O’Houlihan! Proof comes when seeing how the B Story beats of
that movie line up. We first meet Patches on page 30, when Vince
and his team see an old dodgeball instructional film starring the
younger Patches (Hank Azaria). At Midpoint, the stakes are raised, and A and
B cross, when an older
Patches arrives in the flesh and — publicly — tells
Vince that he is now the team’s coach. Since all mentors go
to page 75 to die, Patches does too, giving Vince pause before
pushing him to action in Act Three, where Patches even reappears
— en
spirito — to give
Vince the ghostly final shove he needs to go on to dodgeball
greatness. Rudimentary? Yes. Silly? Of course!
And yet this basic construct appears again and
again.
Whether the B Story is one person like a love
interest, mentor, or sidekick, or a group such as the host of
helpers the heroes learn from in the Act Two worlds of
Legally
Blonde,
Miss
Congeniality, and
Gladiator, these B Story pulse points denote the function
of forcing the hero to learn his real lesson.
And all of it ties back into
Theme!
Keep in mind the only reason for storytelling and
why A and B must cross throughout: It’s to show the true
reason for the journey is not getting the tangible goal, but
learning the spiritual lesson that can only be found through
the B Story!
