Do you wait for the muse to ignite your imagination?

And wait, and wait, and wait—

Then, consider fueling your fiction with an ever-ready  source of inspiration.

FEAR.

Our characters lead us places we’d rather not go—that’s the fear I’m talking about.

Of course, we don’t want to go down that road, but then why did we invent that character in the first place?

Forget the muse and tap into the energy of personal grief and failure—the emotionally honesty of our characters may depend upon it.

What do you fear about your story?

This is week-5 of my course, Don’t Get it Right, Get it Written, and some students seem hesitant to blitz that first draft. Is more instruction needed, or are they waiting for inspiration?

Waiting for the muse—waiting, waiting, waiting.

My muse may not give me the silent treatment, but I don’t count on her to make my fiction ring true. Not since the time a beta reader—unimpressed with my work-in-progress—asked me:

“PJ, what do you fear about your story?”

I retreated to a café with my notebook to reflect upon my story, my protagonist, a self-indulgent artist with a dying wife, a son with a nervous disorder, and a runaway daughter. Kids! What a responsibility. Parenthood, it’s a set up for failure. Sure, I struggled to raise my own child. Okay, we weren’t the best parents in the world. Did our own self-indulgences mess him up? I don’t know. Do we have to go there?

I had to go there.

Never mind what I thought my story was about, this was powerful fuel for the story that had to be (re)written.

(For the record, I don’t have a daughter, though I have a son who ran away. He was five when he packed his little red suitcase and marched as far as the sidewalk, where he stopped, then tromped back into the house, slammed the door, and said there were too many kidnappers out there. He’d leave in the morning. But I digress…)

The fuel that fires the engine

My novel, ROXY (Tradewind Books, 2009), features a 17-year-old heroine who travels to Greece to tend her estranged grandfather on his deathbed. The idea grew from the seed of compassion I felt for my own dying grandfather, whose mind “flickered like a fluorescent tube,” he said. He was in tears as he struggled to reason and remember.

Fear of death—there’s a bottomless tank of jet fuel.

SMOKE THAT THUNDERS (Thistledown Press, 1999), was inspired by a one-legged river man. As a hydrologist in Africa, I visited old Changwe every month at his river gauging station. When my contract expired he begged me not to go, even put it eloquently on paper. The letter spoke to me of innocence and goodwill and cruel fate. Whatever became of him?

My heart still breaks for old Changwe, who appears in my novel. His lifelong dream to become one with his river serves to fuel the story engine through the final act.

Writing should be risky

We enjoy forcing our protagonists to suffer their failures, but what about ourselves? I feel that a story should threaten the writer, somehow. Writing should be risky.

By tapping into our fears and our failures we can animate our fictional characters, and thereby fuel the story engine.

Leave the muse alone. She’s fickle, coming and going as she pleases. Nor does she know much about tough love.

Fear—there’s the mistress we should summon. She’s right here, right now, ever ready to fuel our fiction.

“Every story is an escape story.”

I’ve taped that slogan to the wall of my work station.

It clarifies my character’s trajectory.

It helps my story “come true” because it acknowledges a fact of our human condition:

We are all escaping something.

That notion hijacked my brain after a decade of professionally assessing and writing film scripts. I found myself emotionally invested in characters who were trapped. And it remains the case in every good story I encounter.

Here’s what I continue to discover:

All the best protagonists are trapped within the gravity field of an idea, a relationship, or any situation that makes life not worth living. Naturally, they’re going to escape. Or die trying.

Three great escapes:

The Great Escape—Steve McQueen is a prisoner of Stalag Luft III. Of course, he escapes.

A Room with a View—Lucy Honeychurch, on holiday in Italy with her chaperone, tries to escape the company of man to whom she is unsuitably attracted.

In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart is a prisoner of his self-pity. If he doesn’t put his broken heart behind him, audiences will demand their money back.

Three stories, three kinds of prison—a concrete jail, a relationship, a belief system.

Three kinds of escape dominate most story plots.

#1. Escaping a prison or place

Prison stories depict characters whose goal is a physical escape. O Brother Where Art Thou, for example. And the futuristic Escape from New York. And the current The Maze Runner.

Escape or die trying!—it’s box office gold.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy yearns to escape Kansas for a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops.” Once she lands in Oz, the story is all about finding a way back home.

In Casablanca, which is essentially a love story, almost every character is preoccupied with escaping the Nazis by flying to Lisbon and onward to freedom in America.

The escape to greater freedom—it’s a condition of our human condition.

A more subtle and more common escape theme in fiction is…

#2. Escaping a Relationship

Love affair, job, family—these are relationships from which it’s never easy to walk away. A prison break is nothing compared to escaping some relationships.

Fatal Attraction depicts a happily married man who risks a one-night-stand. Big mistake. His partner in infidelity assumes a relationship from which our protagonist struggles to extricate himself. He’s lucky to escape with his life.

In the Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac, a bride on the way to her wedding instructs the taxi driver to “Keep going! Don’t stop. Pass the church! Whatever you do, keep driving!” She escapes the wrong man and goes into hiding. Close call!

Once again, in Casablanca, Bogey has escaped to the ends of the earth in hopes of never crossing paths with the woman who broke his heart. Who hasn’t felt the need to escape a relationship? Yikes! Let’s not even go there.

But the most subtle and most significant escape theme concerns…

#3. Escaping Oneself

From On the Waterfront, to Moonstruck, to Good Will Hunting, to Silver Linings Playbook, the protagonists are on a trajectory toward escaping their own self-destructive attitudes and beliefs. Casablanca! Again. The protagonist is engaged in all three escapes.

The hero’s redemption (and ultimate victory) hinges on their transcending their self-concern. And it rarely happens unless the writer brings the hero to the point of despair.

It’s another fact of life—and fiction:

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”  ~ William S. Burroughs

Why do we need to escape ourselves?

Because we are all liars. By necessity.

“We tell ourselves stories that can’t possibly be true, but believing those stories allows us to function. We know we’re not telling ourselves the whole truth but it works, so we embrace it.” ~ author, Seth Godin

The delusions that underpin our human condition—and our equally human yearning for the truth—drama depends on it.

It’s as if fiction exists to remind us that we are born to escape.

Born to escape.

If it’s true that we’re born to escape, it’s one of the juiciest facts of life. It may explain why we read and more importantly (for writers), why we are driven to write fiction in the first place.

This week, check it out for yourself—the films you watch and the novels you read—see if it’s not true that:

EVERY STORY IS AN ESCAPE STORY.

If you’re writing a story and creating a protagonist—can you identify the prison they’re trapped within? What kind of escape is he or she engaged in?

Any thoughts? Share them in the “Comments” below.

I teach the “2-story” story.

Never mind the three-act structure, the best stories can be said to consist of two stories separated by a bottomless hole. Where the hero “dies.”

STORY ONE—from the opening line to the protagonist’s loss of faith in him/herself.

STORY TWO—the protagonist emerges from the hole armed with the moral authority to resolve the story.

THE HOLE—the heart of the story, where all is lost and all is gained. And where audiences, instinctively aware that principles and beliefs obscure our greatest happiness, swoon.

In the first of six classes I’m giving here in my seaside village of Gibsons, British Columbia, I asked the class to consume their fiction with an eye out for that blessed hole in the story. Films depict this essential story moment more obviously that novels. But to my surprise the novel I’m currently reading offered up one of the most graphic examples.

Ask the Dust, by John Fante.

Even you, Arturo, even you must die

The protagonist, young Arturo Bandini, a struggling writer in L.A., jeopardizes his happiness by treating other ethnics as badly as he was treated as an immigrant child in Colorado. After sexually mistreating a Jewish woman, his self-respect plummets. Listen as Arturo comes untethered from his own long-held beliefs about the way the world works:

“Then it came to me like crashing and thunder, like death and destruction. I walked away in fear… passing people who seemed strange and ghostly: the world seemed a myth, a transparent plane, and all things upon it were here for only a little while… We were going to die. Everybody was going to die. Even you, Arturo, even you must die.”

Arturo’s first thought is of death, corporeal death. But until that happens he’s stuck suffering the more painful loss of his belief system.

“Sick to my soul, I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God? What Christ? They were myths I once believed, and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.”

A sick soul cannot fuel the organism. A person with no beliefs has no goal. Character, which is synonymous with plot, comes to a full stop.

End of Story-One.

“I said a prayer but it was dust in my mouth. No prayers. But there would be some changes made in my life. There would decency and gentleness from now on. This was the turning point. This was for me, a warning to Arturo Bandini.”

Story-Two begins. It’s a different protagonist who drives the story to its completion.

So, who else spotted a hole in a story this week?

Look! The story has a hole in it!

I have critics who insist that my so-called “story heart” presents nothing new, that I’m simply describing the well-known Act II crisis, which is true. There’s no need for me to stand on my soapbox and shout:

“Look!—there’s a hole in my story! And everything’s flowing into it!”

But, really, I do. In my opinion, its significance overshadows all other story elements. Look what’s getting sucked into that black hole:

The protagonist—disillusioned with the utter failure of his strategies, he falls off the time line into the hole. Really, he’s out of time. What a relief.

Ergo, the plot likewise disappears—bye, bye, for now.

The readers, there they go. Vicariously escaping the prison of narcissistic beliefs, they’re free at last. Every story is an escape story, and the hole is the portal to freedom. For readers, this is the payoff. But for real life interfering, this is where our deepest yearnings would lead. This is where drama delivers. This is where we get our money’s worth.

The writer, too, of course. There she goes, having spent how long loving her protagonist all the way to this dark heart. A writer lives for the moment she can deliver her hero to the hole in the story.

Arguably—I’m working on a proof—we writers are nourished daily by loving our fictional characters in this way.

In this week’s class we discuss “characters.”

Character as plot, as the story engine, and why the hero must die.

If you do know, for God’s sake, tell me.

I’m teaching a course in the fine art of blitzing a 1^st draft and it occurred to me that I ought to know what a story is.

A definition of story, I’ll start with that. A writer who knows exactly what a story is will write more efficiently and won’t waste time unnecessarily. Here for instance, a definition from a respected source.

“Once upon a time, in such and such a place, something happened.”

Okay, true enough, sure, fine, as far as it goes. Next?

“A story is the journey someone goes on to sort out a problem.”

The experts have been arguing over story for a long, long time and this is the best they can come up with? Next.

“Stories are the flight simulators of human life.”

Stories, a practice for living? This is the conventional wisdom on this subject, and that’s reason enough to be suspicious. But no student of story should be caught dead buying into such a utilitarian rationale. How can anyone, much less a story-academic reduce the fiction experience to a training session? Training us to do what—navigate politely through a culture that’s underpinned largely by lies?

The same expert goes on to say:

“The main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.”

Wait a minute. I consume good fiction so I will die at the end. Don’t die at the end is just dead wrong. That the hero “dies,” and the reader, too—that’s the virtue of fiction. Who are these people who say, Don’t die? Fiction has been telling us since forever that no one grows up who doesn’t die and die and keep on dying to old and outmoded versions of themselves.

Stand by—I feel my own definition coming on—but first more from my research vault:

“A narrative deals with the vicissitudes of intention.”

I like this one, first of all because I know what vicissitudes means. Secondly, it suggests that what we want is going to backfire. “Desire—it carries us and crucifies us,” says author-philosopher, Muriel Barbery. There’s a gutsy definition of story. Next.

“A story transforms the monster into a lover.”

I found this as a reader’s comment to an online article about Scheherazade. “Monster to lover” defines the dynamic at the heart of most good stories. It’s the radical change of heart. Heroes leave their monstrous narcissisms behind. And the upshot looks for all the world like love.

Addicted to stories—why, why, why?

My 25-year study of fiction leaves me convinced that the conventional wisdom about story overlooks its essence. The same blind spot characterizes discussions of Why We Read.

For example: We read to escape a world of troubles. Excuse me? Since when are stories about anything but trouble? “Trouble is the universal grammar of stories,” says story aficionado, Jonathan Gottschall.

Ditto for Why We Write.” Here’s Gloria Steinem: “Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” I love that, but—why is that so? What is it about stories that has hooked us since the dawn of time?

What is it about us—our human condition—that is so addicted to stories? Perhaps I should begin the course with a definition of the human condition:

The human condition

A marvellously workable matrix of mental constructs, beliefs, delusions and lies—that’s the mind, that’s our culture, that’s us, that’s your average protagonist. In other words, the status quo of a fictional hero is a house of cards. We’re a precarious situation, and readers instinctively know it.

If you were to write a novel called The Valley of the Happy Nice People, readers would anticipate disaster. Probably be a best seller. Because the status quo is untenable, stories naturally depict characters on a journey toward something more real. Along the way, the blessed disillusionment occurs.

So, what is a story?

I’m working on it.

But it concerns characters trapped within the prison of their belief systems. And they escape the monstrosity of it. Or it’s tragic, and they don’t. Or they come to terms with their imprisonment, armed with a new and more all-embracing point of view.

In every case, the reader of the story is compelled by the hero’s trajectory toward the death of the false.

Not infrequently a protagonist will actually die in the aftermath of their awakening, and despite the death, audiences swoon.

Don’t die at the end? Who are these people who say don’t die?

They better come to my class. It starts tomorrow.

No one should worry about thinking outside the box.

Because THINKING is the box!

Worry about that, instead.

As fiction writers, we needn’t worry personally about the existential angst that “thinking is the box!” might stir up. But we should concern ourselves with how “thinking” relates to the journeys of our characters. And it goes like this:

If we really love our protagonist, we won’t ease up on him/her until they’ve utterly finished with thinking. From opening gambit to the story’s major crisis—thinking reigns supreme.

Thinking reigns supreme

The hero’s goal, her motivation, strategies and actions through the beginning and middle of a story, it’s all a function of thinking. It takes the hero a long way, but (in a good story) never all the way.

Thinking takes our POV character from Page One to the brink of the story heart, but thinking should never be allowed to move her through the heart to the story’s resolution.

This is a basic principle I work with, and it helps me break down the story into two parts.

A super-simple overview

Story One portrays the character operating within his thinking box. It’s a magnificent box of powerful biases and beliefs which, when spent—when emptied utterly—opens the protagonist to “seeing.”

Story One—thinking.

Story Two—seeing.

Is that simple, or what?

I have a habit of devolving into a rant at this point, because, although obvious to me, many story experts don’t grasp the significance of seeing vs. thinking. And yet the difference may explain nothing less than why we’re so addicted to fiction.

We yearn to see truth for ourselves

There comes a time in every struggle—if we’ve fought hard enough and failed—when we lose faith in ourselves. The hero grows tired of the sound of her own voice, and weary of the lies she’s forced to tell herself to sustain belief in her strategies. She rejects herself, her thoughts—the whole freaking box!

This is the moment of truth.

But truth is not served by a fictional character digging once again into her bag of tricks to come up with a last ditch solution. It’s just more box! It’s often called “thinking outside the box,” but as we know now, thinking IS the box!

Audiences get their money’s worth when the hero escapes the box for the freedom of no-thought (a few milliseconds will do) and the “seeing” that is the miraculous consequence. If you want to call that a religious experience, go ahead, please. Because it is powerful enough to give the reader a blast of authenticity. And that’s what’s addictive.

Anyway…

I’m designing a writing course for local writers here on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. I aim to present a few keys to writing a killer first draft. “Thinking is the box!” is one such key.

Not to overload the writer with rules, these basic principles and overviews will encourage the writer to write the most reckless-but-considered first draft possible.

And you — what are your guiding principles? When you set out, what are those big “story” thoughts without which you would never leave home?

Let me know in the “Comments” below.

If you’ve been reading my deep travel tales, you’ll know how un-smart I am.

Count the times I’ve been run down on the road less traveled!

I was barely home from my travels in Africa and Asia when the gods pulled a U-turn and made roadkill of me yet again.

I was filming in the Canadian Rockies

I was shooting a film on the geomorphology of the high country. Think erosion. Even solid granite breaks up over time and washes to the sea. Everything disintegrates, including the human psyche.

Especially mine.

After an exhausting day filming on scree slopes above a chain of turquoise lakes and then debriefing the tapes over dinner with the sound tech we drove to Lake Louise to be closer to our next location. It was midnight by the time we found a tent site on the perimeter of a campground.

We pitched our tent and fell asleep.

I woke at dawn with rain drubbing softly on the sagging canvas.

I heard something else.

I crawled half out to peer around the tent—

Grizzly! Not six feet away from me.

Front paws on the picnic table, she sniffed our cooler, our food supply. Last night we had unloaded the jeep and then hastily secured one end of our pup tent to the table before passing out.

I’m sorry! I told you, I’m not that smart!

The bear took a second to fix me in the cross-hairs of her cold gaze.

I nudged Ken and whispered, “Grizzly.” He wanted to see. I shook my head furiously. He stuck his head out, withdrew, looked at me: “Three cubs.”

Worst case scenario. Now what?

Now what?

The tent collapsed.

The weight of the cooler and everything spilling out—bacon and steaks and yogurt, and bread, coffee, apples, raisins, nuts and milk and a week’s supply of Snickers Bars—it flattened the tent with us beneath it.

Four bears were sitting on us, eating. And not quietly, I might add.

While we lay still as death.

I thought of Fred.

Fred and I had played hockey at university. He was 6-3 and damned good-looking before he met the grizzly who left him minus one hip, a broken back, no scalp, half a face, and a chewed elbow, and those were just the physical injuries.

I was eroding inside, already.

I’d been here before, my life stopped dead in its tracks. (The cheetah comes to mind, remember?) My granite sense of self becoming “Fred,” I couldn’t muster the necessary thoughts to convince myself that life had meaning.

There was nothing left to obscure the fact that life has no meaning.

There was nothing left.

Hold that thought.

If you’ve read Story Structure Expedition, you’re familiar with how I recruited authors more eloquent than myself to do the heavy explaining through moments like this. Well, here we go again:

John Gray (The Silence of Animals), he sounds like he’s been under a grizzly’s picnic tablecloth:

“Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves.”

That’s it! What every crisis has taught me.

If Mr. Gray moves over we can squeeze physicist, Alan Lightman, into this dilemma:

“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. Underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.”

Lightman is describing the fictional protagonist waking up in the Act II Crisis.

At the heart of the story, heroes see the world as it really is.

Un-smart like me

I’m not saying I’m a hero, but I certainly have been serially un-smart. My talent for not being too smart for my own good has earned me the moral authority to enter the Act III of my life.

And now, writing from the perspective of the final act, I want to share with you some of my discoveries (however arguable they might be):

1. The meaning of a human life is to realize—by whatever means possible—that nothingness is our most precious possession 
2. The best fictional protagonists do just that
3. Which aids and abets our own struggle to see the world as it really is
4. And that’s why we read fiction
5. And perhaps why we write it.

CUT BACK TO ACTION:

Behind the falling rain, low voices. The canvas was suddenly snapped back to reveal a uniformed park official standing over me with a rifle. He shook his head in dismay, or disdain.

I know, I’m an idiot, I’m sorry.

Mama lay in a heap, tranquilized, while her three cubs found refuge up a tree. Campers, soggy in the early morning rain, watched in disbelief.

I know, I know,  I’m sorry! It’ll happen again, I assure you.

Because:

Good writers—like good protagonists—are never too smart for their own good.

[POST SCRIPT: All this “meaning” business notwithstanding, I didn’t sleep well in a tent for a few years after that.]

Every writer should be so lucky as to have an idea virus eat their brain.

Here’s how it happens:

1. First you catch it.
2. Then you get it.
3. Once you’ve got it, you can kiss your old self goodbye.

This is the story of how existence conspired to throw the book at me—literally—and infect me with an ideavirus that set me free.

A book called Positive Disintegration

I caught it with two hands. Yes, there really was a book. I was living in Africa at the time. After all these years I still remember my roommate tossing it to me. He didn’t hand it to me, nor is tossing accurate, no, he chucked it at me. He’d run out of sympathy for me and my “Dear John” letter.

“She’s engaged to someone else already,” I said. “I’ve only been gone two months.”

“Go, girl,” he said

“Yeah, go to hell.”

Anyway, it was a book called Positive Disintegration. Written by someone whose name I couldn’t pronounce. Kazimierz Dabrowski.

The English was stiff and the syntax was Polish but I quickly got the gist of it—something about our mental development from infancy to full maturity (whatever that might look like) occurring through five hierarchical stages. Between each level lies an existential hellhole.

Hellhole—hello!

“Hey, Gary, thanks for this.” My roommate was an industrial psychologist.

Nothing is broken, we don’t need fixing

According to the book, each pothole on the road of life serves as an alchemical crucible. Our negative emotions start the process. So, please, we don’t need drugs. My suffering would propel me to the next level of integration.

The author prescribed creative expression—music, art, writing, whatever. The most imaginative thing I was doing in Zambia at that time was learning to fly, but my instructor had grounded me until further notice.

I started writing poetry. Who was I kidding? Next up, painting. Gary was not amused with my floor-to-ceiling murals in the living room. Movie making was next. I acquired film stock from the president of the local Cine Club, cheap black & white 8 mm film from Russia.

My friends dropped everything to help out. They heard I was shooting a movie called The End. The protagonist smokes himself to death. My script called for atmosphere, so we lit a fire in the living room. I could barely see the actors through the viewfinder. Now we all had tears in our eyes. It was great.

That night, sleepless, I processed the footage in the kitchen sink. To my horror, my developer kit was short the fixer. The silver halide would continue to expose. The film would turn black. I needed fixer!

It was gone midnight but I jumped on my motorcycle and raced across town through the dangerously dark and muggy streets of Lusaka, Zambia, risking potholes, speed bumps, bicycle thieves and black dogs.

I was speeding faster than I dared—for my film—for art! I was beginning to forget myself.

I dipped into a pocket of deliciously cool air and for a second I felt so alive that I even forgot my film. I had almost forgotten her! Dabrowski was right, I was growing out of myself.

I must have forgotten about gravity because I lifted off the face of the earth. From up there, here’s what I saw:

My despair wasn’t bogus, and yet it was lost in the greater scheme of things. There was this project known as Me, all about self-improvement, which is okay, I guess, except it looked so puny.

I was making myself my life’s work—my happiness—and, well, it’s just too small a work.

I never came back to earth

When I became a writer, Dabrowski’s hypothesis helped me to understand:

• The human condition
• Why we are so compelled by stories
• And how fiction really works
  

Without catching Dabrowski’s positive virus, I could never have written Story Structure to Die For, or Story Structure Expedition: Journey to the Heart of a Story.

You won’t believe this, but upon my return to Canada I discovered that Dabrowski lived for six months of the year in my home town of Edmonton. Six blocks from where I lived! We became good friends. He would serve me strong coffee and dark chocolate while I told him the stories of my serial disintegrations. I can still see his eyes sparkle.

I made a film of Dabrowski

I made a documentary film of Dr. Dabrowski’s clinical practice.

To my great surprise I was honoured with a medal for my support of the Polish Mental Health Movement.

But getting back to the film in the kitchen sink. I made it home with the fixer, all right. When projected, the scenes appeared all woozy and wavy, as if viewed through a fishbowl.

As if some virus had infected the developer.

It took the film to a whole new level.

The fact that the Heart doesn’t show up in most fiction formulas is meant to alarm writers.

One reader must have become alarmed after reading it in my new article: THE HEART OF THE STORY: What Is it, Where Is it, and How Do We Get There?

I’m grateful to writer, Rahma Krambo, for Tweeting it because it reminds me why I’ve been hammering away on this issue for so long. The Heart doesn’t appear in most writing manuals!

Is anybody else alarmed?

It surprises me that I hadn’t previously devoted an article to the Story Heart such as I’ve done here — not on my own blog but over at Helping Writers Become Authors.

Click on over and see what all the ruckus is about.

I have to thank K.M. Weiland for offering her wonderful website for my heart rant. I can’t think of another writer who appreciates what might really be going on in this little-known heart of a story.

Thanks, Katie!

Coming up in a day or two, the next episode in my Travel Series:

Deep Travel: When Have You Gone Too Far?

I was browsing Amazon’s Kindle Store this morning.

In the Story Structure Department I noticed a drama unfolding:

“Writing by the rules” vs. “Organic writing.”

On  one side it’s all structure and story engineering while the other camp is chanting, Don’t get it right, get it written!

But hold on a minute. The traditionalists insist that structure doesn’t mean formulaic.

The debate rages on writing blogs where the “rule rebels” get to express their disenchantment with the confusion of so many story theories. And who can blame them?

Enough already!

To hell with story theories

To hell with graphs and grids  and plot points and page counts and blogs and eBooks and audiobooks and podcasts and webinars and all those online courses with all their marketing savvy—that’s the growing mood out there.

One writing guru has published a title clearly meant to fan the flames of discontent. The subtitle of his book reads: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules.

Who doesn’t like to break the rules!

Well, it turns out to be a pretty standard writing text. Can’t say that I’m surprised. The book’s author is an accomplished novelist, he knows very well what a story is. I’ll bet he knows the rules so well that he knows how to break them. He’s probably a master story engineer.

“Prose is architecture,” said Ernest Hemingway.

And if that’s too didactic, try this:

“Structure is only the box that holds the gift.” ~ K.M. Weiland.

That’s straight from K.M. Weiland’s bestseller, Structuring Your Novel.

The gift that lies at the heart of fiction

I love it.

If the rebels reckon they’re beyond story structure, then they should explore “the gift” that lies at the heart of fiction. Yes, there exists a scene in every good story that lies beyond story structure.

I call it the hole in the story.

A story is two stories separated by a gap

The most ruthlessly simple overview of story suggests that a good story is actually two stories separated by a gap.

A chasm so deep that the plot comes to a halt at the brink.

The plot seems to serve this purpose—to hound the protagonist into this existential nothingness. This scene—often called the “Act II crisis”—is structure’s gift.

Story structure exists fore and aft of this hell hole, which becomes for the hero a chrysalis of moral adjustment. This is the gift.

Here, in the heart of the story, the hero disavows himself of himself. All strategies, structures and belief systems fall away and the human organism finds itself in a position to transcend its own self-serving delusions. This is the gift.

I introduce this concept in my short eBook, Story Structure to Die For.

The heart of the story

Fiction moves beyond structure when the protagonist lands in the heart of the story.

The story heart knows nothing of story mechanics. The heart doesn’t do reason or rules. It has nothing but disdain for a character’s logic, strategies, and petty desires.

Here in the heart we encounter a story’s “sacred mechanics.”

Here the hero finds freedom from the rules that have been preventing his true happiness.

Free of rules! This sounds like the very place an “organic” writer wants to be.

But consider this:

If the rule-rebel-writer wants to love her protagonists sufficiently to deliver them to the gift at the heart of the story, she’ll need a structure to get them there.

A writer needs a story structure to love her fictional characters the way a writer ought to.

If thinking of “story” like this makes sense to you, let me know.

How to fulfill an audience?

I mean, really fulfill.

I think I know what nourishes me.

The romantic genre, for example. Boy meets girl – boy loses girl – boy gets girl back. We’re meant to swoon at the “getting back.” And we do, sure, kind of.

But honestly, do we consume fiction to see characters simply get what they want? How banal. How everyday. How superficial. (I’m getting depressed just writing this.)

Case in point—the movie Perfect Sense.

Here’s a story that almost comes true. The film is on a trajectory for greatness, but with the final shot the writer turns his back on the story. He gives us the standard romantic convention—boy gets girl back—roll credits.

The writer opts to merely sate the protagonist’s desire. And for this we have given up two hours of our precious time?

Perfect Sense makes perfect Hollywood sense

Perfect Sense is your standard romance—boy meets girl, etc.—except that the story unfolds during a global epidemic in which the afflicted become deprived of their five senses. Smell is the first to go, then touch, then hearing, etc.

I saw it coming and was excited—billions of people rendered deaf, dumb and blind. Wow! Humanity will discover that the habitual doors of perception have actually been obscuring life’s true beauty. With the senses gone, pure consciousness will prevail…

And love will have its way with the world.

The perfect sense is love

(Didn’t I just write about this just last week?)

All over the world—in India, Mexico, Thailand—whole populations are moving beyond themselves, helping each other, falling into each other’s arms.

This isn’t boy-meets-girl love, this is impersonal love.

This is Big Love.

The best stories end with Big Love

We saw it in Casablanca, where the hero sacrifices the love of a woman for a higher cause. Love for the wider world—this is Big Love. And it doesn’t just satisfy an audience, it nourishes.

But look again—it’s not even the love that melts our hearts, rather it’s the pain of the sacrifice. It’s Bogart emerging out of smallness. It’s the escape from the small self.

It’s the birth of an evolved consciousness.

Okay, just call it “growing up.”

Oh, yeah… almost forgot… we were talking about Perfect Sense.

The boy, who has met girl and then lost girl, is just about to find girl again. They’re on a trajectory to fall into each other’s arms at the moment the disease renders them blind. Excellent. The screen will go black just before they find each other.

It’s a clever twist on the usual ending, which worked for Crocodile Dundee and When Harry Met Sally and scores of Hollywood romances before and since. But wait a minute! Something’s radically wrong here in Perfect Sense.

While the Big Love disease is sweeping the planet, our protagonists only crave each other. Their love is small, puny. No way I’m buying this ending.

I WANT MY MONEY BACK!

Can’t the director see what’s wrong with this picture?

Let this pair of protagonists find each other, sure, good. But by now they’re infected with Big Love, aren’t they? Petty personal preferences take a back seat to a world that so badly needs love to have its way.

These two characters have proven themselves to be great lovers in the standard, carnal, self-interested sense. Now it’s time for great love to serve the wider world.

That’s how the best stories end.

The degree to which Big Love prevails in the climax, that’s what determines our satisfaction with the story.

That’s what fulfills me, at least.

What more can I say with any certainty?

What satisfies you?

I’m not saying that The Two Faces of January is a great movie.

But the Viggo Mortensen character serves to show how many good stories end.

It goes like this…

And love has its way with the world.

You don’t hear it, no one says it, it’s the subtext. It’s even more “sub” than that. It’s what the audience feels in themselves:

And love has its way with the world.

The protagonist has his way for most of the movie. He may be charming but he’s self-centred, misguided, and self-destructive. (I’m talking about most fictional protagonists.) His way with the world has created mayhem and misery. It’s called the plot.

Now at the end, having failed utterly, what else can the protagonist do? He disowns his game plan…

And love has its way with the world.

Contrary to popular belief…

You know that happy-ever-after feeling—well, this is it. Think about it. The feel-good feeling rarely has anything to do with heroes winning or successfully manipulating people or events. Nobody achieves love. It’s transpersonal, isn’t it? Love is a grace.

Love does us.

Audiences feel good because their virtual heroes are done to.

Check it out for yourself—your favourite protagonists are probably those who finally get out of their own way so they can be done to by a force beyond their power to manipulate.

We’re talking about escaping from our “second nature.” It’s the one that prevents us from knowing the first.

Marcel Proust identifies this second nature as the heavy curtain of habit which conceals from us almost the whole universe.

CUT BACK TO:

The Two Faces of January and Viggo Mortensen lying dying on a street in Crete…

[SPOILER ALERT! Not really. Students of story aren’t concerned about spoilers. We consume fiction to better understand it! We want to know how fiction works. But I digress…]

Viggo Mortenson has been an incorrigible swindler, con man, and liar, and here in the final scene, with a bullet in his back, he has one chance to come true. And he better be quick about it.

Viggo has one chance to prove the film’s title—The Two Faces of January.

Janus is the Roman god of transitions, the god of gates and doorways, of endings and beginnings. Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking backward, one toward the future.

Viggo is Janus at the threshold.

Viggo’s second (bogus) nature is evaporating in the blinding light of his first nature. He’s glimpsing almost the entire universe. At the very least he probably wishes he could take back a whole lot of unfortunate history.

But of course it’s too late do anything more than die in truth.

Protagonist dies and yet audiences feel good—what just happened there?

Answer: Freedom trumps death. How does that work?

Answer: Because love is finally having its way with the world.

I’m falling in love…

I’m falling in love with this turn of phrase. It slipped out while I was writing the final chapter of The Writer in Love. My protagonist is likewise caught in a dead-end where he surrenders his game plan. He is Janus at the threshold of a new beginning.

As are most good protagonists.

As are we all in a moment of crisis.

Deep down I know that if only I would quit deluding myself, love would have its way with my world, too.

Isn’t writing fun!

You won’t believe me but…

As this shot was taken I was mining deep thoughts:

The price of freedom is death. ~ Malcolm X

I read it in a book called Death, the Last God.

All this death business relates to my work-in-progress, The Writer in Love. In this personal essay I suggest that “paying the price” is precisely what proves the fictional hero’s heroics.

The Writer in Love concerns itself exclusively with this “death” that takes place at the heart of a story. This is the scene where die-hard protagonists undergo a radical change of heart. They find themselves in such a deep dead-end that they have no choice but to surrender. Everything. Especially who they think they are.

We writers should be clear about our responsibilities to the protagonists we create—the hero must die. While most writing manuals mention this “Act II crisis,” I seem to be alone in suggesting that here is the reason readers read and writers write.

It’s worth a book!

But how do you write about something as amorphous as death? I’m trying to write about death as a station on the hero’s journey, but how to sound convincing? Death is without dimension or language. It has no shape.

A book needs shape. It needs limits and dimension. Otherwise, what are we spending $4.99 on?

Anyway, I badly needed to step away from the keyboard and spend the day processing new insights about how death makes life worthwhile.

I must have been in a trance when I took this pic—why else would anyone snap a shot of their foot? I was probably musing over another quote from Death, the Last God:

“Ideas of finding happiness and serenity away from the inevitable suffering of death are the superficial desires of spiritual materialism. We have to find happiness and serenity in the inevitable suffering of death. And that is a very different journey from seeking happiness by getting what we want.” ~ Anne Geraghty

I love it. Happiness in death. Talk about a tough sell. It’s killing me!

Here I am having a heart attack. Just kidding. The shutter caught me bending down to examine what appeared to be my doppelgänger lying in the surf—a dead jellyfish.

I know what you’re thinking, that PJ is all spoof and superficial happiness on this Mexican beach, but the truth is I’m in agony. I’m stuck. And it’s not writer’s block, it’s worse. I’ve written myself into an existential crisis.

I didn’t plan it, but my essay morphed into fiction and I became the protagonist trying to write a book. (Yes, very meta, I know.) It’s a book that takes the shape of a journey to the story heart. I only wanted to be the narrator, but I have become a fully-fledged protagonist.

Es horrible!

You see, if I’m a protagonist, I can’t permit myself to escape the facts of fiction. Starting with, the price of freedom is death. As in, I’m going to fail so miserably at this book project that I lose all faith in myself. As in, this book is going to be the death of me.

Well, folks, it’s happening!

I’m proving the existence of the story heart by my despair at failing to finish this book. Fantastic! Of course, now there might not be a book. Which might have explained why I’m on the beach, had I not been refreshed by these latest musings on death.

Here’s a friend I met farther along the beach. He was plucking out that Nat King Cole classic… Smile though your heart is aching / Smile even though it’s breaking…

What’s Nat saying here?—even though you’re dying, be happy, don’t worry, smile.

Talk about serendipity. I came to the beach mainly to digest a passage from When Things Fall Apart, written by that irrepressible little Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön

Ms. Chödrön has calculated how long a person is required to “die” in order to disable the matrix of habits we mistakenly identify as “me.” Astonishingly, Chödrön has calculated it to the tenth of a second…

1.6 seconds.

One point six seconds!

Is she being facetious? Who cares? This is something I can run with. One point six seconds, that’s how long the hero is required to keep his eyes open in the blinding light of utter annihilation. (Sounds like no time at all, but consider that the mystic Nikos Kazantzakis called this the “supreme human achievement.”)

One point six seconds—suddenly I have the framework for my book.

My whole book concerns 1.6 seconds of time.

Now, that’s shape!

The price of freedom is death, and in 1.6 seconds you’re paid in full. And the price of my book will be only $4.99. That might be the best five bucks a writer will ever spend.

If not, you get your money back.

“The superior virtue is not to be free but to fight for freedom.” ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I know writers who would argue, “That’s just a man talking.”

Seriously, you’d spend $12 to watch a movie called The Valley of the Happy Free People?

No one has made such a movie and for good reason. Audiences don’t pay to vicariously experience being free, but rather to suffer the personal crises that open us to freedom.

Which explains why screenwriters write movies like Zorba the Greek, Casablanca, Thelma & Louise, and Good Will Hunting.

And American Beauty, Moonstruck, A Late Quartet, A River Runs Through It, Up in the Air, Out of Africa, The Artist, A Room with a View, and A Passage to India.

And Rocky, Sideways, Nebraska, The Matrix, Disgrace, Ordinary People, Of Gods and Men, On the Waterfront, The African Queen, Silver Lining Playbook, American Graffiti, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Labor Day.

Labor Day I saw just last night.

If you’re like me you don’t just watch movies, you examine them for how the writer does it. Does what? Frees the protagonist.

It happens in all the best fiction.

Every protagonist is on a trajectory toward freedom.

Let’s look at Labor Day.

Josh Brolin plays Frank, an escaped convict. Ask him about freedom. His bid for freedom will intercept the lives of a mother and son living in small town USA.

Kate Winslet is Adele, who has lost all faith in herself in the aftermath of a divorce. She’s a prisoner of the belief that she’s an utter failure. She can hardly get out of bed. Don’t ask her anything.

Henry is Adele’s adolescent son. Since Henry is not the protagonist, he is not required to behave as though he were fighting to be free. However…

Henry has to bring his poor depressed mother breakfast in bed, for goodness sake. Ask Henry if he’d like to be free of the responsibility that weighs so heavily upon him?

Labor Day is unique for depicting a trio of characters who each find freedom early in Act I.

Most stories depend upon a merciless plot to beat the hard-headed protagonist into an awareness of how to solve their problems, but in Labor Day the miracle takes ten minutes.

Five minutes into the film, Frank shows up to kick-start the story. Injured from his leap out a prison hospital window, Frank politely but firmly inserts himself into the lives of Adele and Henry. The violence and trauma you’d expect to characterize an abduction are quite unnecessary in this case.

Adele blows convention out another window by acquiescing almost immediately to this stranger’s demands. She wants nothing more than to escape her sorry life. Perhaps to end it.

(To die and be reborn—there’s a freedom trajectory!)

Frank, Adele, and Henry foresee their salvation in this strange and sudden togetherness. But wait! They haven’t arrived in Freedom Valley yet. Not only would that be utterly boring, but it ignores Kazantzakis’ aphorism:

The superior virtue is not to be free but to fight for freedom.

The manhunt!

Kazantzakis will be happy to know that the police are closing in on Frank. The story becomes a fight to escape the forces that would annul these newfound freedoms.

Suffice to say that Adele, Henry, and Frank must remain freedom fighters into the foreseeable future. And I think that’s an accurate portrayal of the human condition.

However many jail breaks we execute, the walls of our human condition keep us under house arrest. The fight for freedom is an ongoing battle.

Which explains why The Valley of the Happy Free People strikes us as a bogus premise.

Freedom isn’t a place, it’s an attitude. Good fictional protagonists earn this perspective only after the plot has beaten the apathy right out of them. Now we realize that there are two ways to live, just as there are two ways to die.

“Free or not free—this is our choice in every moment.”

And that’s a woman talking, by the way—Pema Chodron.

Just had a thought…

Why doesn’t someone write a story about an escape from Happy Valley?

Here’s a story theory of mine worth checking out:

http://writetodone.com/facts-of-fiction/

…published today on the Write to Done website.

I mean it when I say, “Check it out.” The next film you see or novel or read, examine it for the escape story it most probably is.

And if you’re writing a story, see if your protagonist isn’t escaping from some kind of prison. Of the different kind of escapes possible, one of them is the key to writing fiction that gives readers their money’s worth.

I’d love to hear your thoughts once you’ve read the post. You can comment here below, or on the Write to Done site.

I’m living in both locations for a few days.

Cheers.

PJ

“How fiction really works”—that’s pretty much the focus of my blog.

Last week I risked wandering off topic with a post about my mother’s 100^th birthday. And this week I’m buying into a game of “blog tag.” My mission—should I wish to accept it—is to answer four questions about…

My writing process.

I’ll do my best to make this relevant not only to writers but anyone who wants to see how I arrive at a final statement that goes like this:

Utter failure is the portal through which everyone (fictional or real) finds freedom.

Let’s go:

1. What am I working on?

Something called THE WRITER IN LOVE. It was meant to bolster ideas I introduced in Story Structure to Die For, namely that a writer must “love her protagonist to death.”  The book begins as an imagined journey up the Congo River to the heart of darkness. There, deep in the jungle, unable to advance any further, and having abandoned all hope, I would jump ashore and plant my flag in the little understood “story heart.” Here, then, is an expedition into THE HEART OF A STORY.

Poets and mystics would support my claim that this heart lies beyond the story’s plot. The protagonist runs out of geography! Imagine that. The heart has nothing to do with time and space. It is a transcendental experience. To prove my point, I find it necessary orchestrate my own failure. I begin to question why a writer needs more story theory. I have to escape my own project. I abandon ship! And so what started out as a “how-to” book is looking more like a novel, and one with no boundary between past and present. I have no idea how to finish it.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Metafiction—is that a genre? Is there a genre where the protagonist discovers that his writer is also on board? And he becomes concerned that perhaps this writer doesn’t love him sufficiently or appropriately, and by that we mean she isn’t prepared to love him to death. But what kind of protagonist is it who wants to die? It makes no sense. It will make sense by the time it’s over. I wish it was over.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I wish it was over.

4. How does my writing process work?

Up at 6-ish o’clock. Two hours of writing before connecting to the wired world. Minutes removed from sleep and I’m back on that steamer heading up a jungle river. I love it. This discipline of jumping immediately into my work-in-progress is the best part of my writing life.

I often make the mistake of going over yesterday’s work to put a finer point on things. I probably shouldn’t. But I find it difficult to proceed if things don’t add up. Of course, I love rewriting. Endless drafts, that’s the name of my writing game. Without them what chance do I have of my writing becoming art? Rewriting, the weave becomes tighter. Subplots and motifs resound more deeply. Magic happens—I find out what it is I’m actually writing about.

As for my story-making process—yes I do practice what I preach. But what I preach is so simple—The protagonist will come undone. That’s it! That’s what readers anticipate. Beliefs systems will crash and burn. That’s what readers demand.

Utter failure is the portal through which every character finds freedom.

There, you see? I’ve just discovered why I write.  #3 — Why do I write what I do? To spend my life vicariously escaping to freedom.

Now, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to S.K. CARNES, a writer living in Friday Harbour on San Juan Island off the coast of Washington State. Sue is the author and illustrator of an award-winning children’s book, My Champion, and of a masterfully written novel, The Way Back, newly available on Kindle. If you want to know what a natural wordsmith sounds like, read Sue Carnes. Soon, perhaps next week, Sue will offer her own unique insights into her writing process. Sue’s blog can be found at http://susancarnes.wordpress.com/.

When a drama rings true I want to cry. 

I do, it’s true, I confess, I’m hopeless, when the story rings true I just can’t help it. 

But in my defense let me put a finer point on this “ringing” business—I’m starting to say that the story has come true.  The protagonist has come true.  He or she has had a radical change of heart. 

There’s a word for that—METANOIA—look it up.  It really means a profound “change of mind.”  A no-going-back-to-the-way-things-were-before shift in worldview.  A new way of seeing things.

Take The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.  (What, you haven’t seen it?) 

An extreme narcissist is dragged (literally) through the Siera Madre mountains of Mexico to his agonizing undoing in the film’s penultimate scene.  It is so truly acted that there is no doubt in my mind that I am in the presence of the human organizm experiencing a universal repentance—a metanoia. 

Here is a character so utterly disillusioned, so emptied of his personal bullshit that he finds himself escaping the gravity field of his small self.  I’m sorry, but when I am present to anyone (virtual or not) breaking free, I weep with joy.  

Now, you might want to argue about how growth occurs.  It’s the old geological issue—evolution by infinitesimal increment over millennia, or through cataclysm.  Well, both as it turns out.  But the notion of sudden, terrifying, and radical metanoia is relatively new, and it still challenges many writers.     

Of course, explosive change is nothing new to Eastern traditions.  Zen monks, by their austere practices, cultivate the essential condition of “emptiness” that invites a new way of seeing things.  Even Christian mystics claim that true poverty of spirit “requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works.” ~ Meister Eckhart

My new best friend, the famous American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, went spelunking into this emptiness and returned with an appreciation of the mysterious Tao. 

According to Merton, we can’t begin to understand the nature of this charitable void “without a complete transformation, a change of heart, which Christianity would call metanoia.  Zen of course envisaged this problem, and studied how to arrive at satori, or the explosive rediscovery of the hidden and lost reality within us.”

Discovering their hidden selves, always painfully, this is what the best fictional protagonists do.  And by doing so—by freeing themselves—they make the human story come true. 

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada came true for me in a scene I can’t forget. 

The narcissist (and who isn’t one, really?), on his knees, emptied of his outmoded self, opens his arms to accept whatever punishment or grace existence may have in store for him.  This kind of surrender—whether explosive or discreet—is where we’re all headed. 

When I am witness to anyone breaking free, I am in profound sympathy with them.  It’s happening to me, there’s nothing vicarious about it!    

So let me ask you this—what if this was fiction’s function—to give us a taste of our own story coming true.

“There will be nothing left.”

(Spoken like a wolf about to strip the meat from the bones of a sheep.)

I’m always looking for a more visceral tease into the ideas I’ve laid down in “Story Structure to Die for,” and this one perfectly describes the tragic trajectory of every good protagonist. 

“There will be nothing left.” 

I tried it out this week.  I began my presentation with it and kept returning to it.  It’s from the Oscar-winning screenplay, Moonstruck.  

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is newly engaged to a momma’s boy.  Then she meets her fiancé’s estranged younger brother.  Ronnie (Nicholas Cage) is an animal, a “wolf” she calls him.  Ronnie is what Loretta needs.  But she is playing it safe in love.  She’s been hurt before.  Loretta is all about playing it safe.  But now, in Ronnie’s apartment, after a disagreement, he picks up his brother’s bride-to-be and drops her on the bed.  

“Take everything!” she cries, “leave nothing for him to marry,” to which Ronnie replies, “There will be nothing left.”

End of Act I. 

This is the writer telling us where the story is going.  I love it when that happens!

This is the writer preparing us for the heart of the story.  This is the writer telling us about the fate of every good fictional protagonist—she will be left with nothing.  She will be stripped of everything she believes in.  Why?  Because belief systems are prisons.  Prisons we chose to live inside. 

Every good story ushers the protagonist to her moment of truth where she is set free.

Nothingness may be our most precious possession

I’m always making a pitch for failure, but it’s a hard, hard sell.  Damned if people aren’t always clamouring for success.  Sure, all conventionally good stories depict a protagonist on a journey to accomplish something.  Something that will grace her life with more truth, independence, or freedom.  

But it turns out that freedom isn’t a function of acquiring anything.  It’s about losing, escaping, surrendering.  All good protagonists, after much suffering, come to understand this. 

The worthy protagonist discovers that freedom is about shedding what is false about him/herself.  Which is everything.

“There will be nothing left.” 

At the moment of disillusionment, the hero realizes that his whole life has been a bad habit, “the heavy curtain of habit,” says Marcel Proust, “which conceals from us almost the whole universe.”

Or “the luminosity of what is always there,” according to American poet Jim Harrison.

Or “the inexhaustible world that exists beyond our selves,” as novelist John Gray puts it.

“This nothingness may be our most precious possession,” says Gray, “since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves.” 

Story structure exists to deliver protagonists to this precious moment.  But they can’t see it coming, never do, never will.  Not even if the writer throws the hero on a bed and stands over her and growls:

“There will be nothing left.”

Readers pay to live vicariously through this nothingness.  It’s terrifying.  It is (arguably) the supreme human accomplishment. 

Dare I say it…?  It’s…it’s…

I was deep in a digital funk yesterday. 

I’d created a Word document, which, after closing, I couldn’t reopen.  The file extension was beyond the ability of my Word program to open.  How the heck does that happen?  

Two hour’s work down the e-drain.

With a debilitating feeling of being hard-done-by, I donned my trenchcoat and went for a walk in the fog. 

A speech about “The Advantages of Adversity”, that’s what I’d lost.  How ironic!  All my first thoughts, my raw material, memories, facts, connections, a web of meaning—all vanished in the e-ether.  

Fresh air usually revives me, but on this especially funky day, every step marched me deeper into despair.  I’m going on a retreat, I thought.  Deep country, unplugged, that’s what I need. Since I’m a digital idiot, this kind of funk overtakes me not infrequently.  Uphill I trudged under a canopy of spruce into the foothills of Mordor, trudge, trudge, trudge… 

I enjoy climbing.  Peaked cap pulled down so that I can’t see the slope, I perceive the road as level.  It’s a little mental trick that never fails to thrill me. 

Unable to reference the incline, there is no hill, no hill working against me.  My organizm is working harder to walk, yes, but there is no hill trying to defeat me, no antagonism, no psychology of struggle, just the indisputable facts of physics.  It never fails, I feel quite unlike myself, as if I were on Jupiter under the influence of a more powerful gravity field. 

Moving about on strange planets takes me out of myself.

Suddenly, a thought out of nowhere: “The rewrite will be better.” 

Rewrites are always better. 

What just happened?  I knew immediately what had happened because I’ve been exploring it on this blog for years—our belief systems.  Good things happen when our “B.S.” outlives its usefulness.  My belief system (victim mentality) had been left behind at the bottom of the hill. 

I didn’t need it on Jupiter.

Wow—self-pity was weighing on me like an evil spell, which is what belief systems are.  They are strategies, structures, rules, biases, attitudes, fears, all the necessary limits by which we negotiate this gloriously superficial life on planet Earth.  When I shed the B.S., I became available to the truth:

My rewrite will be better.

Fictional protagonists, same thing. 

The best fictional characters are cursed with belief systems that are not so easily jettisoned.  The degree to which they hold fast determines the intensity of the drama.  Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.  Listen to him: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” 

That’s the screenwriter telling us what every reader needs to know at the outset of a story—what’s the hero’s belief system? 

With that pitiful attitude, Bogey’s trajectory is set.  Events will conspire to undo his belief system.  Bogey will eat his words or we’ll demand our money back. 

Sure enough, the love of his life (Ingrid Bergman) shows up and ushers Bogey to the depths of self-loathing.  Remember the scene where she pulls a gun on him to get the letters of transit to America.  He says, “Go ahead, shoot. You’ll be doing me a favour.” 

He doesn’t care if he lives or dies.  Now he can jettison his belief system.  What good is a belief system if you’re on death’s doormat?  Ilsa notices him waking up, lightening up.  Now she’s in his arms.  Look at Bogey, he looks a little lost, but now it’s all flooding back, the noble guy he was at the start of the war.  You can see it in his eyes.  He’s catching a glimpse of the truth, who he really is. 

He’s rewriting his script.

The rewrite will be better! 

As we know, Bogey sticks his neck out as far as a neck can go.  He shoots Major Strasser, sacrifices his one true love, orders her to escape Casablanca with her husband so together they might bolster the Resistance against Hitler. 

And, look… there goes Bogart in his trenchcoat, walking into the fog, a living martyr.

Time for me now to man-up and rewrite this speech. 

(Btw… what the heck is a “docx” file?  Is it, like, some kind of curse?)

If you’ve read my eBook, Story Structure to Die for, you’ll remember how my near-miss in Hollywood launched me on a quest to discover…

How fiction REALLY works.

I was privileged to hear from Jack Lemmon and Eva Marie Saint (yes, this was a few years ago) that a screenplay of mine they had applauded nevertheless, unfortunately, devolved into melodrama. 

[Melodrama: n. a drama characterized by extravagant action and emotion.]

It took me a while to understand that my “big finish” had distracted me.  My protagonist lost track of his own story.  Instead, he ran around trying to save everyone else.  I thought it was a great Hollywood ending, extravagant, excessive, tearful, and indeed it bamboozled many judges on its way to emerging as one of eight finalists in a competition with over 4000 entries from 14 different countries.

But it didn’t fool judges Jack Lemmon and Eva Marie Saint. 

Why?  I failed to keep the focus on the protagonist when it was needed most.  I rushed into Act III without nailing my hero to the cross.  Sure, he was on his knees, but I let him get back on his feet because I was anxious to shove him headlong into a melodramatic conclusion. 

I didn’t hold my protagonist back; I didn’t ride him all the way down to the kind of self-doubt where a change of worldview becomes the hero’s only option.  

Where good becomes great.

Think of George Clooney in Up in the Air.  Or better yet, Paul Giamatti in Sideways.  The writer took that wine connoisseur to such depths of self-loathing that he chugalugs the contents of a winery’s wine-tasting spit-bucket.

There’s a man on the verge of freedom. 

As for my protagonist, I released him into Act III too soon.  He wasn’t yet a free man.  He hadn’t yet turned his back on “who he was”.  Act III is all about the new man.

Jack Lemmon and Eva Marie Saint must have been unconvinced that my protagonist had struggled sufficiently with the heroics of transformation.  

As a result, they could agree that my story was “good”, but in the final analysis, it was a few essential beats short of “great”.

We’ve all watched films which, while “good”, were not memorable.  When I’m deeply moved by a story, I’m often not immediately aware of how the writer did it.  It takes some reflection.  Almost always, I find the answer in the degree to which the hero takes care of business.

The business of his own salvation.

THE PASSIONATE MUSE: Exploring Emotions in Stories, by Keith Oatley.

Look at the mess I made exploring my brand new copy…

Most of those flags—37 of them!—are quotable quotes. 

Here’s a few that stick with me:

“Although the emotions of fiction seem to happen to characters in a story, really, all the important emotions happen to us as we read or watch.

By page 17 we already have a whole new way of looking at fiction.

The author is a Psychology prof, so it behooves him to back up his pronouncements with experiments.  Oatley also hauls in some literary giants to support his ideas.  Marcel Proust, for example:

“When he reads, each person is actually the reader of his own self.  The work of the writer is nothing more than a kind of optical instrument that the writer offers. It allows the reader to discern that which, without the book, he might not have been able to see in himself.”  (from “Remembrance of Things Past”, Vol. 6)

Oatley seems to appreciate literature all the more for the rewards that accrue to us unconsciously. 

“Because we experience reality only through our five senses, there is much that is hidden… It is the human condition.  We need assistance.  Part of this assistance…is literature.”

Oatley calls these insights “literary knowing”. 

And “literary emotions” are those we feel as we identify with fictional characters.  Censors worry that these emotions rub off on us.  Rage, hate, violence, eroticism, dishonesty, addiction—six good reasons to ban books. 

Oatley cites research suggesting that fiction can also leave us feeling generous and altruistic.  He calls the effect “elevation”.

“We cry in the closing scenes of Casablanca… because we feel ourselves in the presence of something larger than ourselves, something that takes us out of our egoistic concerns, something that prompts reflectiveness, something that makes room for insight.”

You remember the final scenes of Casablanca—at the airport—Rick has acquired two letters of transit to fly Ilsa and himself to America.  But he surrenders them to her husband, so that he might continue his valuable work with the Resistance against the Nazis. 

Rick loses Ilsa (again), but his altruism elevates us all. 

Says Oatley:

“It’s a strange feeling of warmth and inspiration that occurs when one sees someone doing something altruistic, like helping a stranger, or behaving in a decent way when self-interest would urge them otherwise.  Elevation is a moral emotion.”

Moral acts may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world—or do they?  I beg to differ with Bogie.  These literary emotions are “happening to us”.  And when they work on us in a way that summons our higher nature, the world takes a step toward becoming a better place.

Fiction supports the evolution of the species—that’s me getting grandiose.  That’s me pushing the author beyond the scope of his book. 

But perhaps I can encourage Oatley to conduct some research into this special brand of literary knowing.  By vicariously experiencing altruism—does it actually expand our awareness?

For more insights into Casablanca, check out Keith Oatley’s recent blog post.

And coming up on this very blog—my own take on Bogie’s transformation at the heart of the story.

Finally, what film or novel has moved you the most?  I’m always looking for a good recommendation.

“Monstrous and free”…

The phrase arrested me as I reread Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 

Marlow, the English river boat captain, is describing the jungle that surrounds him:

“…there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.  It was unearthly…”

I get the chills.

Landscape as literary device—Conrad uses it to characterize Kurtz, the rogue ivory trader, whom Marlow has come upriver to find.  Everything up there in the Congo River basin is “monstrous and free”. 

Conrad’s novel is a cautionary tale of “uncivilized” freedom.  Kurtz has attained god-like status by leaving conventional belief systems far behind.  He’s free…and feral.  It’s meant to freak us out.

And here I go, now, crawling out on a limb to propose that most satisfying stories direct the protagonist through a story heart that can be described as “monstrous and free”.

For the protagonist, the major crisis presents an existential dilemma that is both frightening and freeing.  I’m suggesting this as a way to view every story heart:

The heart of a story is a country both frightening and freeing.

I have no proof that Conrad was trying to tell us the same thing.  But here`s a personal story that places “monstrous and free” at the heart of my own story.

It happened in India.

We were seekers experimenting druglessly with altered states.  We put our personal identities to the test by asking ourselves:

“WHO AM I?”

Pairing up, sitting nose to nose, taking turns, Who are you?  “Well, my name is Reece; I have a B.A. in geography, I’m Canadian, I…my favourite book is, ahh… Heart of Darkness… I… ah…”  

Sounds simple enough at first, but it quickly devolves into speculation.  Who am I?  Easier said than done!  Try it.  After five minutes, switch.  Now, I’m listening non-judgmentally to my partner’s stream of consciousness.  Rivers of baloney!  Every 40 minutes, find a different partner.  Eighteen hours a day for three days. 

Day 2 and we are sick to death of our rationalizations, explanations, memories, hopes, dreams and delusions about who we are.  Our belief systems are a cover-up for…for what?  Something is trying to surface…something overwhelming.  We are terrified.  People are crying.  It’s a madhouse!  How can this be happening?  

I find myself allowing all that baloney to fall away…

Miraculously, I have no more thoughts about who I’m supposed to be…

I become a lion on the Serengeti Plain.

Did someone say, “MONSTROUS AND FREE”?  I have never felt such power.  I can see through people. 

Nearby herds of zebra and impala are in serious danger, although for the moment they are quite safe.  You see, I’m not hungry.  Not yet.  My sexual appetite (now that I’m a lion, hmmm…) is another issue.  I recall being mildly troubled by that.  And in the next moment not troubled at all! 

(Don’t worry—attendants kept watch over us.)

Power without a conscience, it’s not a safe state—that’s what I’m trying to say. 

Freedom can serve the monster…or it may serve a higher cause.

I had the support of my fellow adventurers within an arena of trust to guide me through this jungle.  But all the Marlows of the fiction world travel solo into the story heart.  Alone, they face the consequences of a monstrous freedom.

Little wonder that readers are so compelled by the fictional protagonist steaming upriver toward the story heart. 

I’ve been replaying my favourite novels and movies to see if “monstrous and free” applies to their story hearts.  I’ll analyse Casablanca in an upcoming post.  In the meantime, here’s a question to ponder:

Do all Marlows dread the story heart? 

And if so, why do they dock their boat and step ashore and risk becoming “monstrous and free”?

What if we knew WHY READERS READ.

Imagine how confidently we could hammer out manuscripts.  Armed with the motive for consuming fiction, we could easily make our stories come true.

Why readers read—writers would kill for the answer. 

I know, they say that reading is an escape, that it’s a relief from our hum-drum lives.  That’s what they say.  Who the heck is they, anyway?  Conventional wisdom, that’s who. 

Yes, I’m pretty riled up.  Any student of fiction should soon discover that stories are no mere palliative.  We’re hooked on reading.  We’re addicts.  And yet no one—authors, critics, publishers, writing gurus—no one is digging for a deeper explanation. 

And then, to my surprise, I see in the spring issue of The Kenyon Review where poet and novelist Amit Majmudar is talking about the “mystical nature of the literary experience”.  

The MYSTICAL NATURE of the literary experience!

Majmudar speaks of a “mystical union” between reader and protagonist.  He says that by “dwelling outside ourselves a while” the reader experiences a “dissolution of the self.”

UNSELVING he calls it.

(My wife says, “Take that word out and shoot it.”  If anyone can coin a better word, please let me have it.) 

What’s much more important is that Majmudar believes that this literary empathy is…are you ready for this:

“The highest expression of the novelist’s or dramatist’s art.” 

Amit Majmudar is my new best friend.  Here he is again:

“To forget one’s selfhood by e