by Lisa Cron
Imagine that: all three questions were answered in a single sentence.
1. Whose story is it? Joel Campbell’s.
2. What’s happening here? He’s on a bus, which has somehow triggered what will result in murder. (Talk about “all is not as it seems”!)
3. What is at stake? Joel’s life, someone else’s life, and who knows what else.
Who wouldn’t read on to find out? The fact that Joel is going to be involved in a murder not only gives us an idea of what the book is about, it provides the context—the yardstick—by which we are then able to measure the significance and emotional meaning of everything that “comes before he shoots her.”
Which is important, because after that first sentence, the novel follows the hapless, brave, poverty-stricken Joel through inner-city London for well over six hundred pages before the murder in question. But along the way we’re riveted, weighing everything against what we know is going to happen, always wondering if this is the event that will catapult Joel into his fate, and analyzing why each twist and turn pushes him toward the inevitable murder.
Here’s something even more interesting: without that opening sentence, What Came Before He Shot Her would be a very, very different story. Things would happen, but we’d have no real idea what they were building toward. So, regardless of how well written it is (and it is), it wouldn’t be nearly as engaging. Why?
Because, as neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak writes, “Within the brain, things are always evaluated within a specific context.”13 It is context that bestows meaning, and it is meaning that your brain is wired to sniff out. After all, if stories are simulations that our brains plumb for useful information in case we ever find ourselves in a similar situation, we sort of need to know what the situation is.
By giving us a glimpse of the big picture, George provides a yardstick that allows us to decode the meaning of everything that befalls Joel. Such yardsticks are like a mathematical proof—they let the reader anticipate what things are adding up to. Which makes them even more useful for the intrepid writer, because a story’s yardstick mercilessly reveals those passages that don’t seem to add up at all, unmasking them as the one thing you want to banish from your story at all costs.
The Boring Parts
Elmore Leonard famously said that a story is real life with the boring parts left out. Think of the boring parts as anything that doesn’t relate to or affect your protagonist’s quest. Every single thing in a story—including subplots, weather, setting, even tone—must have a clear impact on what the reader is dying to know: Will the protagonist achieve her goal? What will it cost her in the process? How will it change her in the end? What hooks us, and keeps us reading, is the dopamine-fueled desire to know what happens next. Without that, nothing else matters.
But what about stunning prose? you may ask. What about poetic imagery?
Throughout this book we’ll be doing a lot of myth-busting, exploring why so many of the most hallowed writing maxims are often more likely to lead you in the wrong direction than the right. And this, my friends, is a great myth to start with.
MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps All
REALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time
Few notions are more damaging to writers than the popular belief that writing a successful story is a matter of learning to “write well.” Who could argue with that? It sounds so logical, so obvious. What would the alternative be—learning to write poorly? Ironically, writing poorly can be far less damaging than you’d think. That is, if you can tell a story.
The problem with this, along with numerous other writing myths, is that it misses the point. In this case, “writing well” is taken to mean the use of beautiful language, vibrant imagery, authentic-sounding dialogue, insightful metaphors, interesting characters, and a whole lot of really vivid sensory details dribbled in along the way.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Who’d want to read a novel without it?
How about the millions of readers of The Da Vinci Code? Regardless of how beloved his books may be, no one says author Dan Brown is a great writer. Perhaps most succinct, and scathing, is fellow author Philip Pullman’s assessment that Brown’s prose is “flat, stunted and ugly,” and that his books are full of “completely flat and two-dimensional characters … talking in utterly implausible ways to one another.”14
So why is The Da Vinci Code one of the best-selling novels of all time? Because, from the very first page, readers are dying to know what happens next. And that’s what matters most. A story must have the ability to engender a sense of urgency from the first sentence. Everything else—fabulous characters, great dialogue, vivid imagery, luscious language—is gravy.
This is not to disparage great writing in any way. I love a beautifully crafted sentence as much as the next person. But make no mistake: learning to “write well” is not synonymous with learning to write a story. And of the two, writing well is secondary. Because if the reader doesn’t want to know what happens next, so what if it’s well written? In the trade, such exquisitely rendered, story-less novels are often referred to as a beautifully written “Who cares?”
Now that we know what hooks a reader on the first page, the question is, how do you craft a story that actually does it? Like everything in life, it’s easier said than done, which is why it’s the question we’ll spend the rest of the book answering.
CHAPTER 1: CHECKPOINT
Do we know whose story it is? There must be someone through whose eyes we are viewing the world we’ve been plunked into—aka the protagonist. Think of your protagonist as the reader’s surrogate in the world that you, the writer, are creating.
Is something happening, beginning on the first page? Don’t just set the stage for later conflict. Jump right in with something that will affect the protagonist and so make the reader hungry to find out what the consequence will be. After all, unless something is already happening, how can we want to know what happens next?
Is there conflict in what’s happening? Will the conflict have a direct impact on the protagonist’s quest, even though your reader might not yet know what that quest is?
Is something at stake on the first page? And, as important, is your reader aware of what it is?
Is there a sense that “all is not as it seems”? This is especially important if the protagonist isn’t introduced in the first few pages, in which case it pays to ask: Is there a growing sense of focused foreboding that’ll keep the reader hooked until the protagonist appears in the not-too-distant future?
Can we glimpse enough of the “big picture” to have that all-important yardstick? It’s the “big picture” that gives readers perspective and conveys the point of each scene, enabling them to add things up. If we don’t know where the story is going, how can we tell if it’s moving at all?
HERE’S A DISCONCERTING THOUGHT: marketers, politicians, and televangelists know more about story than most writers. This is because, by definition, they start with something writers often never even think about—the point their story will make. Armed with that knowledge, they then craft a tale in which every word, every image, every nuance leads directly to it.
Look around your house. Chances are you bought just about everything you see (even Fido) because while you weren’t looking, a clever story snuck in and persuaded you to. It’s not that you’re easy to boss around, but a well-crafted story speaks first to your cognitive unconscious1—which marketers hope will then translate it into something conscious, like, It may be midnight, but I really do deserve a Big Mac. Gee, she looks so happy; I wonder if I can get my doctor to prescribe that pill. It’d sure be fun to have a beer with that guy, I think I’ll vote for him.
Scary, huh?
So to take back some of that power, writers would do well to embrace this counterintuitive fact: the defining element of a story is something that has little to do with writing. Rather, it underlies the story itself and is what renowned linguist William Labov has dubbed “evaluation�
� because it allows readers to evaluate the meaning of the story’s events. Think of it as the “So what?” factor.2 It’s what lets readers in on the point of the story, cluing them in to the relevance of everything that happens in it. Put plainly, it tells them what the story is about. As literary scholar Brian Boyd so aptly points out, a story with no point of reference leaves the reader with no way of determining what information matters: is it “the color of people’s eyes or their socks? The shape of their noses or their shoes? The number of syllables in their name?”3
Thus your first job is to zero in on the point your story is making. The good news is that this is one of the few things that can actually cut down on time spent rewriting. Why? Because from the get-go it allows you to do for your story what your cognitive unconscious automatically does for you: filter out unnecessary and distracting information.4
To that end, in this chapter we’ll explore how weaving together the protagonist’s issue, the theme, and the plot keeps a story focused; what theme really means and how it defines your story; and the ways in which plot can get in your way. Then we’ll put these principles through a test run, focusing on that literary classic, Gone with the Wind.
A Story Versus Stuff That Happens
A story is designed, from beginning to end, to answer a single overarching question. As readers we instinctively know this, so we expect every word, every line, every character, every image, every action to move us closer to the answer. Will Romeo and Juliet run off together? Will Scarlett realize Rhett’s the man for her before it’s too late? Will we find out enough about Charles Foster Kane to know what the hell Rosebud means?
Thus it would seem that when you’re writing a story, defining what it’s about should be simple—obvious, almost—yet it often proves to be maddeningly elusive. Despite our best intention, the narrative meanders, spending way too much time wandering aimlessly down back roads. So in the end, although a lot of interesting events take place, they don’t add up to anything. No question is asked, let alone answered. The story is so full of things the reader doesn’t need to know that it has no focus, so it isn’t really a story. It’s just a collection of things that happen.
Stories that lack focus often aren’t about anything at all. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But I can’t tell you how many manuscripts I’ve read where if someone asked, “What’s it about?” my only answer would be, “It’s about three hundred pages.” As one editor put it, “If you can’t summarize your book in a few sentences, rewrite the book until you can.”
I agree. Years of reading query letters, synopses, and countless manuscripts and screenplays have taught me that writers who can’t sum up the story they’re telling in a clearly focused, intriguing sentence or two probably haven’t written a clearly focused, intriguing story. It wasn’t a lesson that came easy. I’d read a summary that seemed promising but was jumbled and a little disjointed and think, Hey, the ability to write a good story is very different from the ability to write a good summary. So I’d start reading the manuscript. I rarely got far, however, because it usually turned out that the summary did present an accurate picture of the story, which was itself disjointed and jumbled.
Here are just a few telltale signs that a story is going off the rails:
• We have no idea who the protagonist is, so we have no way to gauge the relevance or meaning of anything that happens.
• We know who the protagonist is, but she doesn’t seem to have a goal, so we don’t know what the point is or where the story is going.
• We know what the protagonist’s goal is, but have no clue what inner issue it forces him to deal with, so everything feels superficial and rather dull.
• We know who the protagonist is and what both her goal and her issue are, but suddenly she gets what she wants, arbitrarily changes her mind, or gets hit by a bus, and now someone else seems to be the main character.
• We’re aware of the protagonist’s goal, but what happens doesn’t seem to affect him or whether he achieves it.
• The things that happen don’t affect the protagonist in a believable way (if at all), so not only doesn’t she seem like a real person, but we have no idea why she does what she does, which makes it impossible to anticipate what she’ll do next.
All these problems have the same effect on the reader’s brain: not only does the dopamine surge we felt when we started reading dry up, but the part of our brain always busily comparing the reward we expected with what we actually got lets us know it is not pleased. In short, we feel frustrated.5 This is evidence that the author hasn’t zeroed in on the essence of the story she’s telling, so even though it may be brimming with exquisite prose, it feels directionless and uninvolving. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to tell us what happens next. We stop reading. End of story.
The Crucial Importance of Focus
What was missing in all those failed manuscripts is focus. Without it, the reader has no way to gauge the meaning of anything, and since we’re wired to hunt for meaning in everything—well, you do the math. A story without focus has no yardstick.
So, what is this thing called focus? It’s the synthesis of three elements that work in unison to create a story: the protagonist’s issue, the theme, and the plot. The seminal element—the protagonist’s issue—stems from something we mentioned in the last chapter: the story question, which translates to the protagonist’s goal. But remember what we said? The story isn’t about whether or not the protagonist achieves her goal per se; it’s about what she has to overcome internally to do it. This is what drives the story forward. I call it the protagonist’s issue.
The second element, the theme, is what your story says about human nature. Theme tends to be reflected in how your characters treat each other, so it defines what is possible and what isn’t in the world the story unfolds in. As we’ll see, it’s often what determines whether the protagonist’s efforts will succeed or fail, regardless of how heroic she is.
The third element is the plot itself—the events that relentlessly force the protagonist to deal with her issue as she pursues her goal, no matter how many times she tries to make an end run around her issue along the way.
Taken together, these three elements give a story focus, telling readers what it’s about and allowing them to interpret the events as they unfold and thus anticipate where it’s heading. This is crucial because “minds exist to predict what will happen next.”6 It’s their raison d’être—the better to keep us on this earthly plane as long as humanly possible. We love to figure things out and we don’t like being confused. For writers, focus is of utmost importance as well: the first two elements (the protagonist’s issue and the theme) are the lens through which we determine what the events (the plot) will be.
How do they do this? By setting the story’s parameters and zeroing in on the particular aspect of the protagonist’s life it will chronicle. After all, our characters live their lives 24/7 just like we do; they eat, sleep, argue with insurance companies, get annoyed when the Internet goes down, veg out in front of the TV, and spend time trying to remember whether that dentist appointment is Tuesday or Thursday. Would you put all of that in a story? Of course not. Instead, you cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.
Done right, we have another mathematical proof, a concrete frame of reference against which everything that happens is measured. After all, this is exactly how our brain processes information when we’re confronted with a sticky situation in real life. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrates, this is what literature is modeled on:
Suppose you are sitting down for a cup of coffee at a restaurant to meet with your brother, who wishes to discuss your parents’ inheritance and what is to be done with your half sister, who has been acting strangely. You are very present and in the moment, as they say in Hollywood, but now you are also
transported, by turns, to many other places, with many other people besides your brother, and to situations that you have not experienced yet that are the products of your informed and rich imagination.… You are busily all over the place and at many epochs of your life, past, and future. But you—the me in you—never drops out of sight. All of these contents are inextricably tied to a singular reference. Even as you concentrate on some remote event, the connection remains. The center holds. This is big-scope consciousness, one of the grand achievements of the human brain and one of the defining traits of humanity.… This is the kind of consciousness illustrated by novels, films, and music.…7 (Italics mine.)
In other words, the center—here, how the question of what to do about said inheritance affects our friend in the restaurant—is the singular reference that everything else relates to. If this were a story, our friend would have an internal issue he would need to work through in order to navigate this inherently thorny situation. Would he be successful? That’s where the theme comes in.
But What Is Theme, Exactly?
There’s a lot of talk about what theme is, and how it’s revealed, which can result in esoteric discussions capable of parsing it down to the thematic use of margarine as a metaphor for innocence lost. Happily, theme actually boils down to something incredibly simple:
• What does the story tell us about what it means to be human?
• What does it say about how humans react to circumstances beyond their control?