You gotta have Tilt

the essential element in making good stories better

My good friend the playwright Lloyd Evans many years ago opined that a story needed tilt. He was referring to something all members of the pinball generation knew- that moment when you lift up or bang the machine to secure some advantageous movement of the ball, but the movement being too great it triggers a freezing of the whole system as well as a red alert flashing and alarm klaxon noise meanwhile the ball dribbles through dead flippers and cushions to its lair under the machine, whereupon it resets amidst much bells and whistles.

The tilt I think Lloyd was referring to was that subtle bend of pushing things to the edge and perhaps in some imagined fantasy getting both the advantage of the cheat plus the recognition implied by all the red lights and alarm warnings.  You have somehow dared and won, squared the circle and got the girl too.

But maybe there’s another reading: Tilt stopped the game, but as the name suggests, it implies a slanted way of viewing things, a different angle. If you get a different view on things the story works better. In other words take a story- boy meets girl at a pork pie factory- now tilt it: the pies are poisoned by a saboteur, a disgruntled employee, now up the tilt some more, in some absurd display of love the boy eats as many pies as he can for a bet, now a bit more tilt, to spare him she eats the last one, which is poisoned- and she dies. Romeo and Juliet under a pie crust…I jest, but not much, for better writing ask: “Just how much can I tilt this story before the alarms bells start ringing and I’ve blown it?”

I think this is the correct reading then- keep pushing, tilting, twisting, upending your basic premise until it’s about to blow, become unacceptable, gross, ridiculous. Stop JUST BEFORE the alarms go off. You have found ‘tilt’.

But then, years later, I learnt from improv master Keith Johnstone, that tilt was what you did to a story platform to upset the status quo and set the story in motion. This was maybe a different kind of tilt.

Well, kind of. In this version tilt is some event or happenstance or imposed condition that changes everything. It also sets the story running but that is secondary (you can set a story running with a trivial event but that is not tilt). Tilt severs and alters the main relationships in the story. Building new relationships is how the story gets resolved. And this means relationships to ideas, places and people as much as the more narrowly defined meaning of the term.

So you can test a tilt by seeing how much UPSET it causes to the things you want to investigate. A big tilt like a giant tsunami is not a very good as a tool for investigating your experiences playing in a string quartet; a smaller but better aimed tilt here might by the forced inclusion of someone outwardly pleasant but poisonous into the group. Remember drama is about submission and domination and a giant tsunami dominates in a rather obvious and perhaps even tedious way.

So we see here that both definitions of tilt come together- think of the best and cleverest and most powerful slant or angle or disturbance you can make to the basic premise- the story platform- in order to excite yourself into completing the story. A good tilt should make you curious as to what will happen. When you write to discover things you are doing good writing.