Charlie, Cinders and the chocolate slipper

My 12 year old daughter told me before school, “Dad, I’ve got an idea for a story I want to write.” I turned from my laptop and took off my glasses to give her my full attention. “Go on, give me your pitch.”

She gave me a string of events. This person (a goody) meets this other person (a baddie). She had all the names and the settings ready to hand. It was a farmhouse I think. Something happens and another thing and another thing, with the result that eventually there'd be an ending.

If this all comes across as vague and nebulous, it was.

I ask her about the details of what is going to happen and if she can define it as one specific, identifiable problem. (What can I say? I’m kind like that, wanting her to dig deeper and think about what it is that made her want to write the story in the first place.)

She then said it could be this or that, or the other - she was unsure.

Fluff.

Wool.

Threads?

Mist.

No story though.

“Look,” I said, “your character has to overcome a problem for there to be a story; a series of events, no matter how beautifully imagined and realised, won't cut it as a story. There has to be an obstacle.”

I referred her to the classic story mountain. Then I reviewed what I’d said. Cinderella was in my mind because my kids had been watching a movie adaptation. However, there was a snag.

And this is really what I want to tell you about.

To unpack my thoughts, I said, “Think of Cinderella. A pretty, happy girl. Mother dies - problem. Father remarries - back on track. Father dies - bigger problem. Stepmother asset strips the family estate, installs her own daughters in a life of luxury and upends the girl's life and makes of her a slave. The poor girl has to kow-tow (let’s be frank) to a trio of arseholes. Handsome prince to throw a ball (not as part of the New York Nicks) and the triumvirate rub Cinders' nose in this - problem and meanness. Cue Fairy Godmother - a glimmer of hope etcetera, etcetera.”

Then it struck me: Cinders has no agency in the story. She’s a well-defined character only in relation to the evil of the stepmother and ugly sisters, and by virtue of the circumstances in which she finds herself. It’s her innate character and environment that propels the story forwards. It’s like diffusion in chemistry, but with more oomph. Osmosis then (Look these up, if you have no clue). And the magic ingredient that fuels this rags to riches transformation? Cinders' inherent goodness. She’s been so wronged; she’s so good; the story universe as a conscious entity is so aware of the unfairness, it acts to redress the balance. In fact, it does more than this - let’s be honest - it totally flips the tables.

I didn’t like this idea of a story relying solely upon this ‘goodness’ running along a gradient of ever increasing wickedness and then doing a flick-flack to assume a place on the podium.

“Let’s look at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” I said. “Oh…”

And that’s when I realised I’d run into the same brick wall. Charlie Bucket is identical to Cinderella. A child pauper whose nose is rubbed into the mud. He lives in squalor within striking distance of a wonderful chocolate factory with no means to get hold of any bars, and he’s tortured by the cumulative tension of seeing golden tickets be snapped up by the most unworthy characters since Dickens. What is particularly odd is how natural it would be to substitute Donald Trump for Mike TV for a modern audience. There’d be absolutely no loss of the story’s fidelity in my opinion.

It got me thinking . How many of these goody-goody gum drops, these sock-puppet characters are there in fiction, who fairly buckle under the weight of their own worthiness?

Incidentally, without the careful structuring around Charlie Bucket, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator fails spectacularly. Coming around full circle; it was a series of loosely related events blundering into each other. I’ve rarely seen such a catastrophic mismanagement of imagination.

If you think this last sentence was a mouthful, it’s as naught compared with the travesty of Bucket's last adventure.