by Lisa Cron
But the plot’s goal isn’t simply to find out whether he snags that brass ring or not; rather, it’s to force him to confront the internal issue that’s keeping him from it in the first place. This issue is sometimes called the protagonist’s “fatal flaw,” and whether a deep-rooted fear, a stubborn misperception, or a dubious character trait, it’s what he’s been battling throughout and what he must finally overcome to have a clear shot at the last remaining obstacle. Ironically, once he overcomes it, he often realizes true success is vastly different from what, up to that very second, he thought it was. This is frequently the case in romantic comedies and is usually the moment when the big lug finally realizes that the beautiful, stuck-up, rich, thin girl he’s been hell-bent on winning since the opening credits isn’t nearly as loveable as the cute, cuddly, beautiful, thin middle-class girl next door.
Not so with Scarlett.
Scarlett’s fatal flaw is self-absorption, which when harnessed to her unstoppable gumption, makes her vulnerable in a way she cannot see. But we can. And so we’re rooting for her not only to survive, but also to gain enough self-awareness to keep herself from throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Does she? Almost, but she’s a day late and a dollar short. Which is why when the book ends, unlike Rhett, we do give a damn.
SCARLETT’S SPECIFIC GOAL—WHAT DOES
SCARLETT REALLY WANT?
But wait; it still feels like something’s missing in our description of the novel. Sure, fatal flaw or not, Scarlett wants to survive. But don’t we all? Indeed we do, which makes survival, in and of itself, generic—one of those abstract universals. In other words, the same would be true of everyone, so it doesn’t tell us a thing about Scarlett herself and adds nothing to the story. The question is: What does survival mean to Scarlett? Plot-wise (that is, on the corporeal plane where the action unfolds) this translates to: What does Scarlett need in order to feel she’s survived what life has thrown at her? The answer is her family’s plantation, Tara. Meaning, land. As her father tells her early on, “Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.…” Land is what ties you to your past and makes you who you are. Without it, you are nothing. This becomes Scarlett’s benchmark, the thing that she’s sure will prove she’s survived.
Is she right? Is land what ties you to your past and makes you who you are? God, let’s hope not. This is why Scarlett emerges both a successful and a tragic figure. And why her blindness to what she truly wants—caused by her fatal flaw—is understandable, rather than annoying or, worse, hair-pullingly frustrating to the reader. Readers are a surprisingly accepting lot when it comes to willfully blind protagonists, provided they understand the reason for their blindness. This is often exactly what such stories are about: why would a person work overtime to stay blind to something that is painfully clear to everyone else? In fact, sometimes the “aha!” moment belongs to the reader rather than the protagonist. It’s the epiphany that comes of realization that not only isn’t the protagonist going to change, but for the first time we grasp the full weight of what the self-imposed blindness is protecting her from.
So, getting back to Scarlett, let’s add a clause to our description:
Gone with the Wind is about a headstrong southern belle whose unflinching gumption causes her to spurn the only man who is her equal, as she ruthlessly bucks crumbling social norms in order to survive during the Civil War by keeping the one thing she mistakenly believes matters most: her family estate, Tara.
Focus, anyone? How’s that for a mini-outline! We’ve taken the theme—survival driven by gumption—harnessed it to Scarlett’s issue, and then run them both through the hurdles the plot lays out for her. By synthesizing the theme, Scarlett’s internal issue, and the plot, we’ve boiled a 1,024-page book down to its essence. In one (albeit long) sentence, we’ve provided enough of the big picture to give a clear idea of what the book is about.
Harnessing Focus: How to Keep Your Story on Track
While clearly this is a very handy method for defining what, exactly, your story is about once it’s written, it can be even more helpful before you begin writing—or at whatever stage your story is at right now. It’s never too late or too early, and it always helps. Knowing what the focus of your story is allows you to do for your story what your cognitive unconscious does for you: filter out everything extraneous, everything that doesn’t matter. You can use it to test each proposed twist, turn, and character reaction for story relevance.
This isn’t to say that once you begin writing you might not change your mind about the theme, the story question, or that the story might not unfold in a completely different direction than you anticipated. But—and here’s another reason why figuring these things out first makes all the difference—if it does change, you’ll recognize it and be able to adjust the narrative accordingly. How? Because you’ve mapped out where the story was headed, you can now use the same map to rechart your story’s course. Don’t forget: when a story shifts focus halfway through, it not only means it’s now heading in a different direction; it also means that everything leading up to that spot has to shift as well. Otherwise, it’s like boarding a plane bound for New York City that lands in Cincinnati instead. Talk about disorienting (not to mention that you’ve packed all the wrong clothes). The good news is that because you already have a map—something we’ll develop in more depth in chapter 5—you know just where those changes need to be.
This will please your readers immensely. Since their implicit belief is that everything in a story is there on a need-to-know basis, the last thing you want is for them to continually trip over all the unnecessary info cluttering up your otherwise splendid story.
CHAPTER 2: CHECKPOINT
Do you know what the point of your story is? What do you want people to walk away thinking about? How do you want to change how they see the world?
Do you know what your story says about human nature? Stories are our way of making sense of the world, so each and every one tells us something about what it means to be human, whether the author does it on purpose or not. What is your story saying?
Do the protagonist’s inner issue, the theme, and the plot work together to answer the story question? How can you tell? Ask yourself: Is my theme reflected in the way the world treats my protagonist? Does each plot twist and turn force my protagonist to deal with his inner issue, the thing that’s holding him back?
Do the plot and theme stick to the story question? Remember, the story question will always be in the back of your reader’s mind, and it is the responsibility of each theme-laced event to keep it there.
Can you sum up what your story is about in a short paragraph? One way to begin is to ask yourself how your theme shapes your plot. Put yourself through the paces just as we did with Gone with the Wind. It may be painful, but it’ll pay off big time in the end.
MOST OF US WERE BROUGHT UP to believe that reason and emotion are polar opposites—with reason as the stalwart white hat and emotion as the sulky black hat. And let’s not even discuss which gender was said to wear which hat. Reason, it was thought, sees the world as it is, while that irrational scamp, emotion, tries to undermine it. Uh-huh.
Turns out, as neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer says, “If it weren’t for our emotions, reason wouldn’t exist at all.”1 Take that, Plato! This is illustrated by a sad story that, even sadder, its real-life protagonist doesn’t see as sad at all. Because he can’t—literally. Elliot, a patient of Antonio Damasio, had lost a small section of his prefrontal cortices during surgery for a benign brain tumor. Before his illness, Elliot held a high-level corporate job and had a happy, thriving family. By the time he saw Damasio, Elliot was in the process of losing everything. He still tested in the 97th percentile in IQ, had a high-functioning memory, and had no trouble enumerating each and every possible solution to a problem. Trouble was, he couldn’t make a decision—from what color pen to use to whether it was more important to do the work his boss expected or spend the day alphabetizing all
the folders in his office.2
Why? Because, as Damasio discovered, the damage to his brain left him unable to experience emotion. As a result, he was utterly detached and approached life as if everything in it was neutral. But wait, shouldn’t that be a good thing? Now that emotion couldn’t butt in and cloud Elliot’s judgment, he’d be free to make rational decisions, right? I think you know where this is going. Without emotion, each option carried the exact same weight—everything really was six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Turns out, as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker notes, “Emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals.”3 Along with, apparently, every other goal, down to what to have for breakfast. Without emotions, Elliot had no way to gauge what was important and what wasn’t, what mattered and what didn’t.
It is exactly the same when it comes to story. If the reader can’t feel what matters and what doesn’t, then nothing matters, including finishing the story. The question for writers, then, is where do these feelings come from? The answer’s very simple: the protagonist.
In this chapter we’ll explore how to deftly weave in the most important, yet often overlooked, element of story—letting the reader know how your protagonist is reacting internally to everything that happens, as it happens. We’ll decode the secret of conveying thoughts when writing in first or third person; expose the sins of editorializing; take a good look at how body language never lies; and rethink that bossy old saw, “Write what you know.”
The Protagonist: You Feel Me?
When we’re fully engaged in a story, our own boundaries dissolve. We become the protagonist, feeling what she feels, wanting what she wants, fearing what she fears—as we’ll see in the next chapter, we literally mirror her every thought. It’s true of books and it’s true of movies, too. I remember in college walking home after seeing an old Katharine Hepburn movie. It didn’t occur to me how deeply I’d been affected until I caught my own reflection mirrored in a darkened store window. Until that moment, I’d been Katharine Hepburn. Or, more precisely, Linda Seton in Holiday. Then all of a sudden I was me again, which definitely meant that Cary Grant was not waiting for me on board a ship about to set sail into a glorious future.
But at least for a few splendid minutes walking down Shattuck Avenue, I saw the world through Linda Seton’s eyes. It was visceral, and it felt like a gift—because my worldview had shifted. Linda was the black sheep of her family, and so was I. She’d fought tradition, regardless of the consequences, and even though she spent years in the proverbial attic, in the end, she triumphed. Maybe I could too. My step was lighter walking home than when I left for the theater.
This is a gift that so many of the manuscripts I’ve since read didn’t quite bestow, because the author had fallen prey to a very common pitfall, one that in essence rendered their protagonist off-limits to the reader. They had mistaken the story for what happens in it. But as we’ve learned, the real story is how what happens affects the protagonist, and what she does as a result.
This means that everything in a story gets its emotional weight and meaning based on how it affects the protagonist. If it doesn’t affect her—even if we’re talking birth, death, or the fall of the Roman Empire—it is completely neutral. And guess what? Neutrality bores the reader. If it’s neutral, it’s not only beside the point, it detracts from it.
That’s why in every scene you write, the protagonist must react in a way the reader can see and understand in the moment. This reaction must be specific, personal, and have an effect on whether the protagonist achieves her goal. What it can’t be is dispassionate objective commentary.
Readers intuitively know what neuroscientists have discovered: everything we experience is automatically coated in emotion. Why? It’s our version of a computer’s ones and zeros, and it’s based on a single question: Will it hurt me, or will it help me?4 This humble equation underlies every aspect of our rich, elegant, complex, and ever-changing sense of self, and how we experience the world around us. According to Damasio, “No set of conscious images of any kind on any topic ever fails to be accompanied by an obedient choir of emotions and consequent feelings.”5 If we’re not feeling, we’re not breathing. A neutral protagonist is an automaton.
How to Catapult the Reader into Your Protagonist’s Skin
When your protagonist’s reaction is up close and personal, it catapults us into his skin, where we become “sensate,” feeling what he feels, and there we remain throughout the entire story. This isn’t to say we won’t feel what other characters feel as well. But ultimately, what other characters do, think, and feel will itself be measured by its affect on the protagonist. It is the protagonist’s story, after all, so we evaluate everyone and everything else based on how they affect him. Because ultimately what moves a story forward are the protagonist’s actions, reactions, and decisions, rather than the external events that trigger them.
Your protagonist’s reaction can come across in one of three ways:
1. Externally: Fred is late; Sue paces nervously, stubbing her toe. It hurts. She hops on one foot, swearing like a sailor, hoping she didn’t chip the ruby red polish Fred loves so much.
2. Via our intuition: We know Sue’s in love with Fred, so when we discover that the reason he’s late is because he’s with her BFF, Joan, we instantly feel Sue’s upcoming pain, although at the moment she has no idea Fred even knows Joan.
3. Via the protagonist’s internal thought: When Sue introduces Fred to Joan, she instantly senses something is going on between them. Watching them pretend to be strangers, Sue begins to plot the intricate details of their grisly demise.
When the events of the story are filtered through the protagonist’s point of view—allowing us to watch as she makes sense of everything that happens to her—we are seeing it through her eyes. Thus it’s not just that we see the things she sees—it’s that we grasp what they mean to her. In other words, the reader must be aware of the protagonist’s personal spin on everything that happens.
This is what gives narrative story its unique power. What sets prose apart from plays, movies, and life itself is that it provides direct access to the most alluring and otherwise inaccessible realm imaginable: someone else’s mind. Lest the significance of this be lost, bear in mind that our brain evolved with just that goal—to see into the minds of others in order to intuit their motives, thoughts, and thus, true colors.6 (We’ll explore this further in chapter 4.) Even so, in life the key word is intuit; movies have the raw power to convey thoughts visually, through action; plays, via dialogue. While all three can be incredibly compelling (especially life), ultimately, they still leave us guessing. In prose, those thoughts, clearly stated, are where the story lives and breathes, because they directly reveal how the protagonist is affected by—and how she interprets the meaning of—what happens to her.
That’s what readers come for. Their unspoken hardwired question is, If something like this happens to me, what would it feel like? How should I best react? Your protagonist might even be showing them how not to react, which is a pretty handy answer as well.
So how do you clue the reader into the protagonist’s thoughts so we’re privy to how he is making sense of what befalls him? That is, how do you let us know what he is actually thinking, especially since it’s often the opposite of what he says? This is a doubly crucial question, since very often a character’s reaction to what happens is solely internal—be it an unspoken monologue, a sudden insight, a recollection, or an epiphany. How you weave it into your story depends on whether you’re writing in the first person or the third person. Let’s take a quick look at each.
Conveying Thoughts in the First Person
Conveying the protagonist’s thoughts when writing in the first person sounds like a no-brainer. After all, since he’s telling us his story, everything reflects what he thinks, right? Exactly. This is what makes it tricky. Why? Because it means that every single thing in a story told in the first person must have a direct, imp
licit, and illuminating spin. Thus the narrator’s opinion is laced into everything he tells you. Each detail he chooses to convey reflects his mindset and reveals something about him and how he sees the world. Think of it as the Rashomon effect: if four people witness the same event, you end up with four very different accounts of it—each one believable. Is one account true and the other three not? Nope, it’s just that given each person’s worldview, they processed what happened differently; each found certain aspects compelling, assigned them meaning as each saw it, and so drew different conclusions.
Is there an objective truth? Maybe. But considering that by definition we experience everything subjectively, how would we know? Which means that in a first-person account, everything the narrator tells us is imbued with his own subjective meaning, simply by virtue of the fact that these are the details he’s picked to tell his story.
How is this different from the spin things have when writing in the third person? It’s a difference in distance. In a third-person narrative, there are times when the reader evaluates the meaning of things relayed by the omniscient narrator (that’s you, by the way), based on what he or she knows about the protagonist. For instance, the fact that Ted decided to surprise Ginger with a brand new plush Day-Glo orange couch is in and of itself neutral. But if we know that Ginger loved her old couch, hates orange, and don’t even ask her about plush, then we’ll have a pretty good idea how she’ll feel when she sees it—regardless of what she says to Ted.