Okay, sure. Or shoot it with a shotgun from a distance. But they’d Still do something sans timer.
Totally agree on that. You’d have to pick one to make a proper argument. With the B&B example, there is definitely a line about the curse becoming permanent on the 21st birthday, but I’d agree that it’s also treated more like an optionlock than Timelock.
Dad is dying. Family wants to create as many good memories as possible before that happens. Doctors are saying about six months, but could be four, could be eight. There’s no limit to the number of memories they can make and none of the memories they make would bring about the end of the story. But once he dies, the story ends. What would the options look like?
I think the options would be “how many kinds of places can we get to” and “what kind of emotional memories do we want to build”?
You’d want to do everything, but eventually he’d get too sick to move (I’m assuming) and then it’s like “Well, we never got to go see a drive-in movie… do we take him, even though we might kill him?”
Also, the movie is probably not just going to be “let’s do fun things!” It’s probably going to be built around some issue to solve, and if personal experience is any guide, that ain’t easy – so it would definitely bump up against the limitation of a failing, ill parent.
But isn’t that saying that the characters haven’t run out of options yet? If he’s too sick to move, can they sit around the bed and laugh at old stories? How does that force a conclusion?
As written, the Story Limit is a confusing optionlock. It is not a timelock because the Story Limit was not locked.
All this speculation is silly from a story creation context because you’re looking at it backwards. A story has a Story Limit of a Timelock or an Optionlock because that is what the author has chosen. BOTH are possible choices until one is decided (from a story creation point of view).
From a story analysis perspective, you must look to what the author gives you – which is why it can be wishy washy if the author is not clear.
The importance of the Story Limit is that it gives the story a boundary that tells the audience the conditions necessary to bring the story a climax, final confrontation, and ultimately a resolution. I like to think of it as the size of the story, which is why it is important that the audience understands what the limit is. Even if you aren’t explicit, the audience will pick up on it if it is there. If it’s not there they won’t have a clue when the story will end (timelock), or what is necessary to bring it to an end (optionlock), and the story will feel like it meanders along without much direction.
I’ve never considered Optionlocks to be about running out of options. I think it’s more like “There are seven things you could do, but you only get to do four, so choose wisely.”
So, in terms of the ill parent scenario, it would be “if we do option A, we might kill him, but if we do Option B, we don’t have a good chance of a Success ending… What do we do?!”
I like this metaphor.
Here are some Optionlock possibilities:
Dad has five friends who live in various places around the world with whom he’d like to make peace before he crumps out.
Dad has a bucket list he’d like to complete before he crumps out
Dad wants his estranged family to reunite before he dies (the number of family members determines the options)
Dad wants to assure his family’s security before he dies, so he goes through the options he has for securing their future: finding a purchaser for his company, paying off old debt, securing scholarships for his kids, and a regular income for his wife.
…and so on.
Chris, would you agree that the below quote from The Matrix is an illustration of, or at least related to, the Optionlock Limit in that film?
MORPHEUS: We have survived by hiding from them … and by running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later… someone is going to have to fight them.
I think it’s a useful example of a limit that isn’t very explicit – most people wouldn’t consciously think of that story as being limited by the options for dealing with agents. Yet somehow when Neo stands his ground in that subway station, you just know that “this is it”.
I think the quote identifies the base inequity at the heart of the story. This is the fertile ground that sets the stage for the story to come.
I think the story is about the introduction of “the One” into that equation – Neo strong text’s what changes the equation. The options I imagine have to do with exhausting all the ways to convince the new guy (Neo) that he is “the one.”
So I’m trying as hard as I can to see it your way. But what is the option lock here? As written, there was nothing to suggest a limited number of options-they were presumably in the middle of another option when the clock hit zero-but it was written so that the timer reaching zero presumably ended the story. Same thing with the dying dad. You offered some great examples of optionlocks, but it was written so that the characters keep going until dads life expires.
Greg, the options weren’t well encoded because they’re just silly examples. Regardless, those examples (changing the time on the clock, dying dad) simply cannot be Timelocks because the time isn’t fixed. Fixed means a specific moment in time that doesn’t change. Unless the dad’s under a magical curse to drop dead on a given date, the limit is one of space, not time. I had a similar question here (dying mom) which Chris clarified similarly: Timelock - specificity of deadline
Okay, thanks Chris. Interesting.
Based on what @chuntley has said, I suppose I could retract all previous answers and say that there’s not enough info to determine. There needs to be a statement of ‘this story is over when…’
Something like ‘we must protect the senator until noon tomorrow’ or ‘we must investigate every floor’ could turn any of the examples into either a time or optionlock.
Neither were the options.
Although I’m still of the opinion that if you look at the story as a whole, you can see the whole thing from beginning to end, the clock reaching zero is still a fixed point within the story whether the characters or audience believed they had twelve hours or two. Without super specific examples, I don’t see a reason the audience can’t go into it being told that the story will climax when the bomb explodes (when, not if) and then switch a twelve hour clock to a two hour clock and have everyone leaving the theater saying ‘I see, even though I thought the character had twelve hours, he was never going to have more than two all along.’ To say that you have to know the limit unequivably up front just seems to me to say that you’re not supposed to look at that one storypoint holistically like you do with all the others. And if that’s the case, I can accept that too.
The difference is if somebody or something in the story actually changes the supposed deadline. In that case, the Author/storymind knows the deadline wasn’t fixed in time.
Your example “even though I thought the character had twelve hours, he was never going to have more than two all along” is okay – in fact that was @MWollaeger’s b) which we agreed was a Timelock. Nobody in the story changed it, it was fixed all along.
So is the important thing that the limit provides a boundary that says “this is what forces the climax, etc.” that the audience can see once they’ve taken in the whole story, or is it that it gives the audience something to expect upfront? Because if it’s the second one, that seems more like audience reception than storyform.
The LIMIT gives the audience a sense that the story has a maximum size or threshold. It is up to the author to be overt or covert in encoding the story dynamic into the narrative. The simple way is to state the limit up front, e.g. “The children have five lessons to learn (Nanny McPhee),” or “You have him for 48 hours (48 Hrs.)” ideally, you want to take your audience into consideration as to how blatant you want to encode story points, which is 100% an author’s choice.
You do not have to tell the audience that the limit will bring the story to a climax, but it must be exhausted before the story is over, so there is a natural connection of the Story Limit to the starting event and the climax/closing event.
I don’t know if this will help anyone but I made some examples with both a bomb countdown and a wedding date.
I think they’re pretty accurate but feel free to disagree. I was careful to only say “not a Timelock” instead of Optionlock for the ones that couldn’t be a Timelock, since I didn’t necessarily try to illustrate limits of options or space in the tiny examples.
So what if you have a bomb set to go off at some specific time. The person who set the bomb knows what time but doesn’t tell anyone and neglects to include a timer on the bomb. It will still go off at some fixed point in time, but neither the major characters nor the audience are privy to this info. Not a Timelock because there’s no ‘hard out’ shown to the audience?
Yep. Think about what you are really saying, though. There is a major detail that the author decides not to share. The problems with this go far deeper than problems with the Limit.
It’s not about the bomb, though. That’s this just this example. If someone’s death were to force the climax, it would make more sense not to share. Again, it’s a fixed point within the timeline of the story, but only the author knows when it will happen until it does happen, so not a Timelock because it can’t be stated up front in order to provide a hard out.