Frankenstein

The story monster with every part in its place is what I call a Frankenstein.

A Frankenstein is a story with everything. All ten parts, the bones, the soul, and the body, working at once. You’ve met a Skeleton, which is bones and nothing else, a Ghost, which is a soul with no body to carry it, and a Zombie, which is a body with no soul bringing it to life.

It’s the only one of them that’s fully alive.

So why build the whole animal, when a Skeleton or a Ghost can do so much with so little? Because the lighter monsters work by leaving parts out and trusting you to fill them in. A Frankenstein leaves nothing out. It gives you a person to become, walks them through the fire while you watch, and lets you feel the change as it happens instead of inferring it once it’s over. That’s why a Frankenstein, built well, sinks deeper than anything else. It’s also why it’s the hardest of the four to make.

The ten parts work like the notes in an octave: a small, fixed set that never runs out of songs. Feed in a different flaw, reward or punish the character differently, and the same ten parts tell a different story every time. A Frankenstein doesn’t even have to be heroic. Turn the flaw into a good quality that rots, and the same shape runs in reverse: Vince Gilligan spent five seasons of Breaking Bad turning his hero ‘from Mr Chips into Scarface’, good curdling into bad, one part at a time.

Building one is not simple. Where the lighter monsters let you leave parts out, a Frankenstein asks for all ten, so the way to build one is to make sure every part is present and pulling its weight. Go through your story and try to answer a question for each.

Take the farmer in Chipotle’s ‘Back to the Start’, two minutes of stop-motion set to Willie Nelson.

Reach for a Frankenstein when you have the room and something worth the effort: a launch film, a founder’s story, a brand documentary, the once-a-year keynote. Most of what you make should be lighter, a Skeleton for the tagline and a Ghost for the campaign, because you rarely need the whole animal and can rarely afford to build it. But when the moment is big enough to hold a full story, and you make one that truly breathes, it’s the one people carry with them for years.