Angling, and not for trout

Hello everybody! Just a quick mention to start off with that I've just started a new course, a radio journalism course, and so far I'm enjoying it - even if it's academically a little slow right now. I guess when you've got an MA in an academic field and just over a month ago handed in your dissertation, moving into a field like radio journalism can seem a little slow to start off with. We'll see how it all goes.


Life report over though. Today, I'm talking about angles; more specifically, how do you make a good one? It's something that's very subjective, so by no means will what I say be the be-all and end-all.


At least I hope not.


If you think back, as a fan either of the hobby or a fan of wrestling, to great angles, what's the unifying concept? In storylines, what makes you remember it, and what makes it successful?


The answer is pretty simple - a successful storyline elevates all the parties involved. The nWo creation storyline elevated Hall and Nash by having them shown as 'the bad guys', it elevated a stale Hulk Hogan, and it elevated the babyfaces by having them turned against suddenly, shockingly, and allowing them to chase for revenge whilst looking competative. The Rick Rude/Dustin Rhodes storyline over the US title in the early/mid 90s managed to elevate Rhodes by giving credability to his title reign, and didn't hurt Rude at all - it made him look competative coming off of injury. In the e/f-wrestling world, something like the Beast/Lindsay Troy/Dis bit (which I'll talk more on later) managed to elevate Lindsay and Beast, by having Beast, the face, wronged and cheated over again by his ex (who'd turned on him when he won the title), and showed Lindsay to be much more cunning than a lot of people would've thought in the new audience she had.

However, good angles like that, which elevate both parties, are very difficult to find sometimes. Quite often, a beatdown will introduce a character or characters to the audience, and from there, the wrestler who was beaten doesn't get anything. That's one example - there are literally loads of others, where the end result is one character gets elevated, and the other, or an entire championship division in some cases, gets damaged and lowered because the blow-off of the angle was such that they didn't look strong - this could be a beatdown, or the end of a match, or a segment, or whatever.

I think a large part of where this comes from is a lack of communication, either between the handler suggesting the angle and the person he wants to do it with, or the fedhead and the handlers who are going to be involved. I've been in four situations where I read a card, and my characters were involved in angles I'd had no idea about which elevated someone else at their expense (incidentally, all four cases were the same handlers' characters), and whilst those angles did elevate the one party, I think they could have been done a lot more smoothly if I'd simply been asked if I was OK to go ahead with them - at worst this common courtesy would've given me the opportunity to say "No, I do not agree to that," and at best a dialogue could've been opened up to have some really great ideas going back and forth, ending up with a better scenario for all concerned. By not communicating, you actually risk alienating one handler - in a worst case scenario you could drive that handler out of your fed, which throws a huge monkey-wrench in any plans you may have had involving them.

Woah, that sounded a little heavy.

Another thing that I sometimes see lacking is a sense of logic in the angle. How often have you seen someone return, beat someone up, and then get beaten down in the same segment? You've brought someone back, or in, and built them up by having a beat-down... and then you damage them by putting someone over them. It's kinda like on RAW recently, you had London and Kendrick come out to help HHH, only for HHH to attack them afterwards! It elevated HHH, but in that one segment (and not for the first time) he hurt an entire division. What made it worse was it made no logical sense for him to be superman attacking the #1 contenders to the tag team championships so soon after he won a handicap match against the champs!

"How can you ensure logic in an angle?" I hear you ask. If the angle is a part of a storyline, then it's actually very easy to do. You sit down and plan the storyline, week by week, from beginning to end - this could be one PPV cycle, three, fifteen, whatever. You basically plan out what's going to happen, why it's going to happen, and what each situation is going to add to the entire thing. Very often I see a storyline start and finish in a couple of weeks, and there's no time to really build any heat. That's something that planning a prolonged storyline does - allows you to build heat (it's coincidentally something I've seen done really well in A1E, so kudos there!).

What's the best way to plan the storyline? Well, you know the aim is to elevate all parties involved. If you want to god-book the ending, you know who's going to win. If you don't god-book, you have to hope the matchwriter can write a close-fought contest to lift both people. But away from those things, which you can or can't control depending, you can plan each event. The heel has to do something to anger the face, and has to have a reason - things done "because I can" rarely work. It's almost like writing a novel - you don't need both parties looking uber-strong throughout, but both need a moment to shine before the final confrontation, which should be close-fought to maintain or enhance the status of both parties.

So, communication and logic... anything else?

Well, yes. Are you going to go with a swerve? A swerve is where you totally twist the story round, either by introducing an unknown, or by flipping the relationship between the two parties on its head. It should preferably be unexpected, but, and I can't stress this enough, it must make sense!!!!!!

Here's where I talk about the famed Dis angle from a couple of years ago. What made it work, for me, wasn't the revelation that it was Lindsay Troy under the mask - that I had already worked out by that point (I'll say how in a minute). What made it work for me was that it was Lindsay Troy under the mask, and it made sense that she was Dis.

The Dis character was a masked character. As soon as it won the Russian Roulette tournament, there was a big clue as to who it was (at least to me - I was a naive rookie back then who didn't know anything outside MCW, EPW and NWL) in the writing style of the promos. The champ at the time was Beast, and Beast had a history in EPW with three people, two where the title was concerned - Dan Ryan (personally, not surrounding the title), Christian Sands, and Lindsay Troy. Beast had feuded with Sands and won the title, when Lindsay turned on him. The two most obvious candidates for Dis going into RR were Sands and Troy, because in storyline terms, it made sense, especially since Dan Ryan would want someone good enough to defeat Beast. Reading the promos at the time, the writing style pointed to one handler more than the other, so the "swerve" of Lindsay being unmasked wasn't that shocking for me - but it was a swerve because it could have easily been Christian Sands (if you were like me) or someone Beast had dealt with elsewhere (which I'd've frowned upon because it wouldn't have made as much sense to the EPW audience). Lindsay Troy unmasking made sense, it was logical, and it was extremely well written, since it gave Beast a boost, it gave Troy a boost, and it worked.


I think I'm starting to waffle here. I hope that clears up what I think an angle needs - it needs to be logical, even with a swerve partway through, and it needs to elevate both parties. Even if it's a one-off deal, I think it should be discussed with the handlers of every wrestler involved, because then you can get more ideas, which could lead to a better angle. This is a co-operative writing hobby, and I'm sure everyone has the same goals - to entertain and have fun. It's like co-operating on a novel - you'd consult each other and make sure it made sense.

That's the angle. Well, it is to me.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I've got a salmon on the line.