Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

by Jessica Brody

  After they leave the orphanage, Farid tells Amir that it’s probably better to just forget everything that happened here in Afghanistan. It’s easier. But Amir proves, once again, that he’s learned the theme and is now fixing things the right way when he says, “I don’t want to forget anymore” (page 263).

  The next day they go to the stadium for a soccer match. At halftime, two “adulterers” are stoned to death by a Taliban cleric.

  POINT 3: HIGH TOWER SURPRISE. After the match, Amir goes to see the Taliban officer. The officer brings out Sohrab, and Amir is overwhelmed by his resemblance to Hassan. Amir soon figures out that the officer is actually Assef—the boy who raped Hassan. If ever there was a chance for Amir to redeem himself and his past mistakes, this is it!

  POINT 4: DIG DEEP DOWN. Assef tells Amir he can have Sohrab, but he has to fight Assef first. Amir gets beaten up pretty badly in the subsequent fight, but he laughs, because ironically he feels at peace for the first time since that day in 1975 when he left Hassan in the alley. “My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until after—but I felt healed. Healed at last” (page 289).

  Amir and Sohrab manage to escape Assef after Sohrab shoots him in the eye with his slingshot.

  POINT 5: THE EXECUTION OF THE NEW PLAN. Amir recuperates from the beating in a hospital, and once he’s regained consciousness he gets a letter from Rahim, admitting that he deceived Amir. There was no family in Pakistan ready to adopt Sohrab.

  Amir asks Sohrab to come live in America with him and his wife. Sohrab eventually says yes, and the two visit the American embassy, only to discover that the chances of Amir being able to adopt Sohrab and bring him back to America are slim.

  Upon hearing this news and knowing that he’ll most likely land back in an orphanage, Sohrab attempts to commit suicide.

  As Amir waits for news of Sohrab’s condition in the hospital, he prays for the first time in over fifteen years. After Sohrab wakes up, Amir tells him that his wife has worked everything out with an American immigration lawyer and they can adopt him.

  Sohrab is different now, though. He doesn’t speak. He’s sort of dead inside. Amir brings Sohrab to California, and his arc is completed when Soraya’s father insults Sohrab by calling him a “Hazara boy,” to which Amir stands up for himself and his nephew and says, “You will never again refer to him as ‘Hazara boy’ in my presence. He has a name and it’s Sohrab” (page 361).

  Time passes, and Sohrab still doesn’t speak. He just sleeps and remains silent.

  15. Final Image (pages 318–323)

  One afternoon, Amir takes Soraya and Sohrab to a park and sees people flying kites. He buys a kite for Sohrab and tells him that his father was the best kite runner in all of Kabul.

  He shows Sohrab how to fly the kite, and they cut another kite’s string. Amir offers to run the kite for Sohrab. Sohrab smiles for the first time since arriving in America, and Amir takes off after the fallen kite, redeeming himself once and for all and becoming the kite runner.

  WHY IS THIS A RITES OF PASSAGE?

  The Kite Runner contains all three elements of a successful Rites of Passage story:

  A LIFE PROBLEM: Although this novel spans decades, it’s essentially a coming of age story. Amir struggles with becoming an adult and dealing with the mistakes of his childhood. He also struggles with feeling unloved and underappreciated by his father, which leads to his life’s biggest regret.

  A WRONG WAY TO ATTACK THE PROBLEM: By trying to kick Hassan out of the house, Amir begins a sequence of wrong way solutions. Until he returns home and learns the truth about Hassan, his strategy is consistently avoidance and diversion.

  AN ACCEPTANCE OF THE HARD TRUTH: Amir accepts the hard truth about his real relationship with Hassan when he agrees to go find Hassan’s son and bring him back to Pakistan, and then even more so when he decides to bring him home to America.

  Cat’s Eye View

  For quick reference, here’s a brief overview of this novel’s beat sheet.

  OPENING IMAGE: Amir gets a call from Rahim, which Amir calls his “past of unatoned sins” (page 1). It’s a cryptic reference to the Catalyst to come.

  SETUP: Amir and Hassan are best friends but have a complicated relationship due to Hassan’s position as a servant’s son. They enjoy fighting kites together. Hassan is Amir’s “kite runner.” Amir also has a complicated relationship with his father, who seems to favor Hassan. A bully named Assef constantly picks on Hassan.

  THEME STATED: Amir overhears his father say, “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.” Amir must learn how to stand up for himself (and others) and atone for his past sins.

  CATALYST: Amir witnesses Hassan being raped by Assef but does nothing to stop it.

  DEBATE: What will Amir do about the rape? His guilt eats him alive, yet he does not report it.

  BREAK INTO 2: Amir approaches the problem the wrong way by framing Hassan for theft, causing Hassan and his father to move away.

  B STORY: After moving to America, Amir meets Soraya, his future wife, who will help him learn his theme of courage and atonement.

  FUN AND GAMES: Amir and his father move to America. His father gets a job as a gas station attendant; Amir attends college to study creative writing. Amir tries unsuccessfully to forget Hassan and his past.

  MIDPOINT: Amir’s father dies of cancer (false defeat).

  BAD GUYS CLOSE IN: Amir writes and finishes his first novel, gets an agent, and sells his first book. Ten years later, he gets a call from Rahim (the call from the Opening Image), asking him to come to Pakistan. Rahim tells Amir what happened to Hassan after Amir left Afghanistan.

  ALL IS LOST: Rahim reveals that Hassan was actually Amir’s half brother and died, leaving behind a son, Sohrab, whom Amir must rescue from a Kabul orphanage.

  DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL: Amir struggles with the decision to go.

  BREAK INTO 3: Amir decides to travel to Kabul to get Sohrab (his nephew), proving he’s learned the theme.

  FINALE: In Kabul, Amir rescues Sohrab, faces off with Assef (now a Taliban officer), and brings Sohrab back to America.

  FINAL IMAGE: Amir teaches Sohrab how to fight kites and becomes the kite runner to the son of his former kite runner.

  Institutionalized

  Join ’Em, Leave ’Em, or Take ’Em Down!

  WARNING! THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:

  The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Giver by Lois Lowry, The Help by Kathryn Stockett

  It’s your first day of middle school. You enter the cafeteria, gripping your tray like it’s a life raft, searching for a place to sit. A place to belong. You see two options: an empty seat at the “cool” kids’ table, or an entire table all to yourself. You know this is a choice that might define you for the rest of the year, maybe even the rest of your life. What do you do? Do you join the group, or do you forge a path alone?

  Does this terrifying scenario sound familiar to anyone?

  Just me?

  Okay, moving on.

  This question—to join or not to join—is at the heart of every Institutionalized story. These are the novels that spotlight groups of people and the ultimate choice whether to be a card-carrying member of the group or go it alone.

  And the answer isn’t always easy.

  Institutions (or groups) come in every different size and shape. They can be as small as a family like the one in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, or as large as a whole town or city, like the town of Maycomb, Alabama, in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harp
er Lee, or the city of Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s in The Help by Kathryn Stockett. They can even be subsections of society, like the world of the “greasers” and “socs” in The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, the world of rich 1920s Long Islanders in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, or the world of the patriarchy in 1930s Georgia in The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Institutions can also be fictional, made-up establishments, like the theocratic society depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the deceivingly idyllic community in The Giver by Lois Lowry, or the dystopian world under the rule of the Party in 1984 by George Orwell. Finally, Institutionalized stories can even center around a unifying issue, event, or thematic element, like modern motherhood, as spotlighted by the three main characters of Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty; life under the rule of Henry VIII, as spotlighted by the three main characters in The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory; or the American Dream, as spotlighted by the eight featured characters in The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.

  The number one indicator of an Institutionalized novel is that the story is about the many. Not necessarily the one. Even in the case of single narrators, as in The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders, or The Handmaid’s Tale, these stories are more about the larger group the hero inhabits, and the hero’s relationship with that group, than they are about the hero’s solo journey.

  In The Great Gatsby, we see the story through the eyes of a newcomer (Nick Carroway), but his life is far less interesting than the lives of the people he gets involved with, namely, Jay Gatsby and Daisy and Tom Buchanan. In The Outsiders, Ponyboy is our eyes into this fraught world between the “greasers” and the “socs” (and he’s the character that changes the most), but there’s a reason the title of the novel is plural.

  No matter which institution you choose to highlight, the essential ingredients of a successful Institutionalized story are (1) a group, (2) a choice, and (3) a sacrifice.

  Let’s look at what we’re dealing with.

  The groups featured in Institutionalized stories are those we’re either born into, brought into (often against our will!), or asked to join. Regardless of size, when done right these institutions can feel like the whole world to the characters inside them…and outside them. And the stories that fit into this wide-ranging genre usually present a centralized deliberation for the hero (or heroes) about the pros and cons of being “one of the gang.” While at the same time, the author of an Institutionalized novel must explore the gang itself. What is this world about? Who are its members? What are its rules? And how easy is it to lose yourself inside this group?

  We readers can relate easily to stories about groups. Human beings have been part of groups from the beginning. We’re born into families, we join cliques at school, we get jobs at companies, we become members of communities. We’re weighing the pros and cons of groups every day of our lives. Institutionalized stories are primal because biologically we’re programmed to flock together. As primitive humans, we died if we tried to venture out to face the woolly mammoth alone. But as we evolved as a species, we began to wonder whether venturing out alone and forging our own path is the better option.

  Which is why, when we read Institutionalized stories, we start asking ourselves questions that lie at the very heart of being human:

  Can we really trust others to have our best interests at heart? Or does there come a point when we must rely on ourselves?

  And which one is crazier? The group? Or me for leaving it?

  Therein lies the origin of the name of this genre: Institutionalized. As we readers dive further into the world that you, the author, have set up for us, we should be seeing a little bit of the crazy that lies within all groups and families. Because the group dynamic is often crazy and sometimes even self-destructive. Herd mentality can defy all logic and reason. Being loyal to a group often contradicts common sense—sometimes even survival—but we still do it. And when we join the many we often lose a piece of ourselves.

  So you, the author of an Institutionalized story, have a fairly tricky task on your hands: honoring the institution you’ve introduced to us, while at the same time exposing the problems of losing one’s identity to it. As you peel back the layers of your “establishment” and reveal to us what makes it tick, we readers should be asking ourselves, What would I do in the hero’s shoes? Would I join or not? Would I stay or go?

  That is the choice at the heart of every Institutionalized story, and our second ingredient for succeeding in this genre.

  To better understand this choice (and ingredient), let’s take a look at three common character types that tend to appear in Institutionalized stories.

  The primary hero of the story (or one of them, in the case of multiple heroes) is often a newcomer to the institution, endearingly dubbed the naif. When this is the case, the naif is usually introduced to the institution by someone more experienced. Someone to show them the ropes and introduce them to this new and unfamiliar world tucked within the great big world. In Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, for example, one of the heroes, Jane, is a naif who gets taken under the wing of Madeline as she steps into the institution of elementary school moms in a posh area of Sydney, Australia.

  In The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Skeeter is our naif. Because even though she’s lived in Jackson, Mississippi, her whole life, it’s not until she teams up with Aibileen and Minny to tell the stories of “the help” that she truly realizes what kind of institution she’s been living in.

  Naifs are often used as the readers’ “eyes” into the world. As they learn the rules, so do we. And it can be especially helpful to have a character like this to ease the reader into the world without the use of too much exposition, aka “info dumping.”

  But not all Institutionalized stories feature a naif character. Some novels are told through the point of view of another type of character called the brando. Named after the notoriously rebellious actor, Marlon Brando, these types of characters are existing members of the featured establishment. They’re already entrenched in the system, but they’re starting to doubt it. Or perhaps they’ve doubted it for years, but what can they do? They’re stuck! This is their world, and the idea of leaving it seems crazy at first. These are characters like Winston in 1984, Aibileen in The Help, Jonas in The Giver, Ponyboy in The Outsiders, Will in Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, Montag in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and Celie in The Color Purple.

  When the novel begins, there’s already something different about these characters. They don’t exactly fit in. They stand opposed to the system by their very nature. But it isn’t until we get into the heart of the story that we see them actually acting on their doubts.

  Naifs and brandos both have the important role of revealing the flaws of the institution you’ve chosen to write about, by being either an outsider (naif) or a rebellious insider (brando). But both ultimately accomplish this task by going up against the third character common in Institutionalized stories: the company man.

  This character embodies the system or institution. They buy into it. They are rah-rah cheerleaders for it. They’re not just a part of it; they will usually defend it to the death. As authors of Institutionalized tales, we rely on these characters to reveal the “crazy” of this world. This is what happens to you when you buy into this institution wholeheartedly and without any reservations. Memorable company man characters include O’Brien in 1984, Aunt Lydia (or all the aunts, really) in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Hilly Holbrook in The Help.

  Because of their unwavering loyalty to the establishment, these kinds of characters tend to come off as insane or sometimes even strangely robotic. They’ve traded a little piece of their soul for the safety they craved within the system. They kind of have to feel a little off; otherwise, how else would they be able to cling so tightly to an institution that you, the author, are trying to poke holes in?

  The company man represents one side of that fateful choice that all Inst
itutionalized heroes must make: stick with the group or get the heck out of Dodge.

  And that choice often gets more difficult as the novel progresses. Loyalty and resolve are tested as the brando or naif (or both!) gets more entrenched in the drama of the institution and its seemingly crazy rules.

  But ultimately, all Institutionalized stories end with the third genre ingredient: a sacrifice.

  Heroes either join the system (1984), “burn it down” (The Help, The Outsiders, The Giver), or escape from it (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Great Gatsby, The Color Purple). The escape can also be a suicide (both literal or figurative).

  Regardless of the ending, the hero’s sacrifice serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of entering into an institution. In the end, the deeper message is about listening to your inner voice. Yes, we all need to be part of some type of group to survive, but it’s our individual human spirit—the thing that makes us who we are—that we ultimately must nurture and protect.

  Beware the group!

  Be yourself!

  To recap: If you’re thinking of writing an Institutionalized novel, make sure your story includes these three essential ingredients:

  A GROUP: a family, organization, business, community or uniting issue that is unique and interesting