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.

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.

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.

“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…

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.