Story Scientist

“The moment I met her, my life changed. Everything I saw, everything I heard, everything I felt, all the scenery around me… started to take on color.” -Kousei Arima, Your Lie in April

I’m cheating a little, summoning the anime weebs to my threshhold. But hear me out. I have my reasons. And if you have watched this show, you know them all too well.

Your Lie in April is the story of Kousei Arima, a child prodigy pianist who quit playing for good after a traumatic experience onstage which left him with deep psychological scars. Living alone, his life veers on a grayscale. His two friends Ryota and Tsubaki are his lifeline, and the musical world feels as distant as ever. That is, until he meets her…

Kaori Miyazono is an eccentric violinist who takes an uncanny interest in him. Slowly, as she drags him out of psychological prison and onstage, he doesn’t only feel his life filling with color as music re-enters it. He doesn’t only feel called back to stage, to music. Imagining his life without Kaori herself, slowly starts feeling impossible.

Your Lie in April is incredibly tear-jerking and larger-than-life for many reasons. It is heroic, effervescent, painfully beautiful, wistful, colourful, emotional, and heart-wrenching for way too many reasons. It is about the power of music, the magic of human connection, the bond of love and friendship, about outliving yourself and making an impact on other people by shining brighter than the Sun. But most of all, it’s about our two main leads: Kousei and Kaori.

These two are the livewire of this show. They are at the centre of its blueprint; they are the heart, soul and lifeblood of this story. Kousei doesn’t exist in his colorless life. Rather, it stems from him. His internal conflict originates from his childhood with his mother, who unscrupulously pushed him towards musical success and perfectionism at a very young age. His breaking point came when she died, leaving him with years of emotional baggage which causes him to breakdown on stage due to his fear of vulnerability and showing his true self. His obsession with putting on a neutral facade and his composure hide deeper truths, as he tries to disconnect himself with music, which he believes can disconnect him from the all-too-painful memory of his mother. We see him as he pushes through each day, hiding his old piano under a tarpaulin, brushing it off when he hears Litz or Beethoven on the street, and blending in seamlessly with the crowd. He is the perfectly broken, damaged child. Comparing him with Kaori is where the seamless magic of the show is born.

Meet Kaori, the eccentric, lively young musician who doesn’t play by the rules. She scoffs at conventional methods of musical expression and doesn’t try to hide her fascination for it unlike Kousei. She is frank, short-tempered, and brutally honest about her fears and insecurities, which she isn’t afraid to come out and say. She lives life on extremes, veering between tears and joy. With the whole story being narrated from Kousei’s perspective, she seems like a splatter of colour on a black and white canvas. That right there, is this show’s greatest strength: the characters. They’re such that you cannot imagine they don’t exist in real life. They feel real, like living and breathing humans. You find yourself thinking what they would do, feeling the things that they do, and you find yourself looking at the world with a hint of their uniquely framed perspective. As if everything they say and do “shines” and their entire existence feels unapologetically human. That is the x-factor that lets emotions flow and tears fly in the viewer/reader. That is the x-factor that we need to replicate. Let’s try a little exercise.

I’ll begin with a writing prompt I found online. Lisa Cron is strictly against using writing prompts as the base of your story, as they lack specificity or internal conflict. But how about we try to add some, and craft these incredible characters that feel real and lived in? Like Your Lie in April? So, the prompt I picked up is:

“Begin your story with someone being followed or following somebody else.”

What do you see first, when you read your one-line vague idea for the first time? I see thriller, thriller, thriller. I see a dark city street, I see corners and crevices hidden in shadows. But remember, I will keep myself from thinking up a story immediately. That’s not what we’re doing here. I’ll focus on the person. Who is being followed?

I find it easier to write about females, so I’ll make it a her. But feel free to challenge yourself if you want. Being followed at night leads me to think of paranoia. Bingo. Reading into your writing prompt which is inevitably a plot point or “something happening to someone,” try to imagine the reaction of that someone. An emotional response will make them clearer. I see paranoia. Now, let’s give her a deep-seated reason to be paranoid. Now, this is most important. We cannot give her a generic reason to be scared, like: “Duh, she’s being followed at night. Of course she is scared.”

But no, I want there to be something deeper behind the paranoia. What if we try to imagine that she may or may not be being followed? It could be all in her head. Why is it in her head though? Why is she so easy to scare, why is she so paranoid? This is checkpoint two. Now, give her a personality trait which explains her reaction. I say: She finds it difficult to trust anyone. She constantly looks over her shoulder, and she feels like everybody is always out to get her. That’s a good starting point. Now I’ll ask ‘why?’ again. Why is she so paranoid and cynical? Now here, I have to describe the heart of her character in one sentence. What is it? It’s her misbelief. The one statement, which defines her fundamental view of the world. Every decision she has ever made since this belief was rooted in her mind has been dictated by it. She is owned by this misbelief, which fuels her constant fear. So what is this misbelief? It seems pretty obvious now, to be honest.

Everybody will betray you. No one is really on your side.

In fifteen minutes, I know my character’s fatal flaw and defining misbelief: the human lie which she believes. It cannot be anything material, like not knowing how the solar system works or where Newton conceived the idea of gravity. It must be a human misbelief, like: “I am not good enough unless I am perfect,” or “Humans are not worth saving,” or “you must always put others first,” or “love is not worth the cost of pain.”

These are all cliche’ which makes them absolutely perfect, because Lisa Cron preaches proudly that it’s the cliche’ and basic human traits that we come to witness in stories. So, my character truly believes that nobody truly loves her and is loyal to her. She believes that everybody is out to get her. She believes she is all alone in this world. Now, again…why?

Here comes the backstory stage. Now, this girl needs a reason why she believes this. More specifically, what exactly happened in her past to make her feel this way? There are endless possibilities. The obvious one is to have someone she loved betray her. Maybe someone she knew was betrayed. Maybe she was socially ostracized at school for some reason, which made her believe everyone is against her. Maybe her parents were away at this time and failed to protect her from the bullying, which led her to mistrust them too. All of these are so vague that it’s painful. But at least these ideas have a purpose. The purpose is to make my character experience something which cements this belief in her brain that everyone is against her, and that is what my plot will overturn. Speaking of plot…

The plot is fairly simple to come up with from here. It only has to provoke her misbelief, and bring it back in full force, and compell her to confront the reasons behind why she believes this. It started out as a thriller, so I’ll keep it that way. A good-old murder mystery. Now, how do we connect this to her inherent paranoia of the people around her? I know!

The suspects are her family! What if, the murder committed instantly makes her believe that it is someone in her family and amongst her friends. What if this story follows her as one by one she mistrusts every person she’s ever loved. Her mother, father, her siblings, her boyfriend, her best friend? What if she suspects them all, and throughout the course of her investigation, is torn between the love she feels for them and her mistrust of everyone around her, which ultimately leads her to go to great lengths to convince herself that it is not them, although she herself isn’t sure whom to believe? Sounding cliche’? Okay, to make it juicier, how about we make her invade their privacy, analyze meticulously the relationship she has had with them, drying herself crazy and ruining her relationships as she obsessively mistrusts and accuses everyone? See how it’s not just a murder mystery anymore? See how it is a battle of emotions and ideals now? About values, and misbeliefs? See how drama is just begging to be released onto paper now? There’s so much we can do here: She taps into her friend’s phone, she finds out secrets about her family members, she starts questioning her own memories with them, she deeply hurts them by refusing to believe in them, and the list goes on. I can just see it. More importantly, in the distance, still behind a thick curtain of fog and vagueness, I see her. I see my protagonist. Now all I have to do is flesh her out and find her. All I have to do is run to her, tear open her soul and read her mental journals. All I have to do is find out everything there is to know about her. And that, will be my story’s livewire.