by Lisa Cron
So if you want us to think that John’s a bad guy, show him doing bad things. It’s just like in life: Imagine your coworker Vicky is telling you about her next-door neighbor, whom you’ve never met. “That John,” she says. “He’s such a jerk; he’s the most self-centered, unscrupulous man I’ve ever met.” Now, even though this may be an absolutely accurate assessment of John, because you don’t know him, nor do you have any idea what Vicky’s basing her assessment on, you have no way of knowing whether it’s true. But you have been listening to Vicky rant on and on about how awful he is. And it sounded sort of bitter. So now you’re wondering what she did to make John into such a meanie. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of her intent.
But if, instead of telling you how to feel about him, Vicky tells you that John steals from his grandmother, shoves past everyone on the train, and spits in his boss’s coffee, you’ll not only agree with her, but you might dislike John even more than she does.
Your job is not to judge your characters, no matter how despicable or wonderful they may be. Your job is to lay out what happens, as clearly and dispassionately as possible, show how it affects the protagonist, and then get the hell out of the way. The irony is, the less you tell us how to feel, the more likely we’ll feel exactly what you want us to. We’re putty in your hands as long as you let us think we’re making up our own mind. That’s why, as omniscient narrator, it’s probably not a good idea to write this:
“I don’t think I can marry you Sam,” said Emily, in that condescendingly bitchy way women who think they’re better than men all seem to have.
Sure, if this were a first-person narrative told by a bitter protagonist named Sam, it would be spot-on. However, if this is the author talking, he is probably telling us a wee bit more about himself than he intends. Which—not to frighten you—is par for the course. As Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, who knew a thing or two about dancing with the devil, said: “Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.”14 Which means it might be time to reexamine that old stalwart: “Write what you know.”
MYTH: Write What You Know
REALITY: Write What You Know Emotionally
If your protagonist is a trumpet-playing-neurosurgeon-turned-CIA-agent stationed in Antarctica, yes, you’d better know something about each of those things. But in the larger sense, “Write what you know” doesn’t refer as much to facts as to what you know emotionally, which translates to your knowledge of what makes people tick.
Writing what you actually know, however, is a dangerous game given our natural propensity to tacitly assume that others have the same knowledge and beliefs that we do.15 This tendency drives what communication scholars Chip and Dan Heath have dubbed “the Curse of Knowledge.” They explain, “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”16
When writers unconsciously assume the readers’ knowledge of—not to mention interest in—what the writers themselves are passionate about, their stories tend to be wildly uneven. On the one hand, the writer is so familiar with his subject that he glosses over things the reader is utterly clueless about. On the other, it’s way too easy for the writer to get caught up in the minutiae of how things “really work” and lose sight of the story itself. This is something that, for some reason, lawyers seem particularly prone to. Over the years, I’ve read myriad manuscripts in which the story comes to a screeching halt while the writer outlines the legal ramifications of every single thing, as if the reader might sue, should some fine point of jurisprudence be overlooked.
Equally treacherous is the common misconception that just because something “really happened” it’s believable (read: makes sense). That’s why it’s always helpful to have Mark Twain’s pithy observation close at hand: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”17
How do you make it make sense? By tapping into what you know about human nature and how people interact, and then consistently showing us the emotional and psychological “why” behind everything that happens. Do you have to hammer this out to the nth degree before you start writing? Of course not. As novelist Donald Windham so astutely says, “I disagree with the advice ‘write about what you know.’ Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.”18
And speaking of understanding, here’s a final word to the wise: the bigger the word, the less emotion it conveys. In fact, the less it tends to convey, period, beyond the vague notion that the author is showing off. This is something that both fledgling writers and winners of the National Book Award can easily forget. To best illustrate the point, here’s said award winner Jonathan Franzen talking about a letter he received from a reader: “She began by listing thirty fancy words and phrases from my novel, words like ‘diurnality’ and ‘antipodes,’ phrases like ‘electropointillist Santa Claus faces.’ She then posed the dreadful question: ‘Who is it that you are writing for? It surely could not be the average person who just enjoys a good read.’ ”19
We are all that average person, and the enjoyment we get isn’t frivolous; it’s rooted in our biology. It’s what allows us to leave our real life behind and tap into how it would actually feel to experience life in someone else’s shoes. Big words? They’re pebbles in those shoes, ironically, distracting the reader from the very story they’re meant to tell.
CHAPTER 3: CHECKPOINT
Does your protagonist react to everything that happens and in a way that your reader will instantly understand? Can we see the causal link between what happened and why she reacted the way she did? Are we aware of what her expectations are so we can tell whether or not they’re being met? And, if she isn’t in the scene in question, do we know how what happens will affect her?
If you’re writing in the first person, is everything filtered through the narrator’s point of view? Remember, in the first person, the narrator doesn’t mention anything that doesn’t relate to the story and that doesn’t already have his personal spin stamped on it.
Have you left editorializing to the op-ed department? The more you have a message you want to convey, the more you have to trust your story to do it. The joy of reading is getting to make up your own mind about what a story’s ultimate message is. The joy of writing is being stealthy enough to stack the deck so your reader will choose yours.
Do you use body language to tell us things we don’t already know? Think of body language as a “tell,” something that cues your reader into the fact that all is not as it seems.
BEFORE THERE WERE BOOKS, we read each other. We still do, every minute of every day. We instinctively know everyone has an agenda, and we want to be sure that agenda isn’t to clobber us, either metaphorically or with a hammer. What we’re hoping for is kindness, empathy, and maybe a nice big box of chocolates. So it’s interesting to note that the term “agenda” often carries a negative connotation, implying something decidedly Machiavellian, as in duplicitous, manipulative, and cunning. Truth is, agenda is just another word for goal—making it completely neutral and utterly necessary to survival.
In fact, Steven Pinker defines intelligent life as “using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles.”1 Almost sounds like the definition of story, doesn’t it? It’s interesting, too, that the most common obstacle in both life and story is figuring out what other people really mean. That’s no doubt why, as neuroscientists have recently discovered, our brain comes equipped with something they believe might be akin to X-ray glasses: mirror neurons.
According to neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, who pioneered the research, our mirror neurons fire when we watch someone do something and when we do the same thing ourselves. But it’s not just that we register what it would feel like physically; our real goal is to understand the action.2 As Michael Gazzaniga has noted, thank
s to mirror neurons, “Not only do you understand someone is grabbing a candy bar, you understand she is going to eat it or put it in her purse or throw it out or, if you’re lucky, hand it to you.”3
Mirror neurons allow us to feel what others experience almost as if it were happening to us, the better to infer what “others know in order to explain their desires and intentions with real precision.”4 But here’s the kicker. We don’t just mirror other people. We mirror fictional characters too.
A recent study, in which subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain while reading a short story, revealed that the areas of the brain that lit up when they read about an activity were identical to those that light up when they actually experience it. Yes, yes, I can see those of you who’ve read steamy novels nodding sagely and thinking, Uh, you needed a brain scan to tell you that?
Here’s what Jeffrey M. Zacks, coauthor of the study, has to say about the physical effect a story has on us: “Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story.” But it goes much deeper than that. As lead author of the study Nicole Speer points out, the “findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.”5
In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist’s skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don’t know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.6
It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? So in this chapter our goal is to zero in on how to define your protagonist’s goal, since it’s what bestows meaning on everything that happens. We’ll examine the difference between her internal and external goals, which are often at odds with each other; explore how both are driven by the core issue she’s struggling with; and discover how to create external obstacles for her that add drama rather than stop the story cold.
Everyone Has a Goal
Mirror neurons allow us to walk a mile in the protagonist’s shoes, which means he has to actually be going somewhere. The good news is that everyone—real, fictional, or somewhere in between—has a goal. Even those who want to remain exactly as they are and never change an iota have a goal—in fact, it’s the biggest challenge of all. Staying the same in the face of the constant onslaught of perpetual change is no easy task, no matter how snuggly you strap yourself into your La-Z-Boy recliner, how firmly you close your eyes, how deeply you stick your fingers into your ears, and how loudly you hum.
The even better news is that what your protagonist wants dictates how she will react to everything that happens to her. None other than former president Dwight D. Eisenhower perfectly captures the essence of a successful story: “We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.”7
In a story, plot-wise, what all other considerations bend to is the protagonist’s external goal. Sounds easy enough, until you add the fact that what her external goal bends to is her internal issue—the thing she struggles with that keeps her from easily achieving said goal without breaking a sweat. As we’ll see throughout, this internal struggle is what the reader came for, whether he’s conscious of it or not. The driving question is: what would it cost, emotionally, to achieve that goal?
Let me give you a quick down-and-dirty example. In the movie Die Hard, what’s John McClane’s goal? To stop pseudo-terrorists from murdering everyone at the company Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza? To kill Hans Gruber? To live to see the dawn? Sure, he wants to do all those things. But his goal, which the movie makes clear in the very first scene, is to win back his estranged wife, Holly. And so everything that happens forces him to confront the reasons she left him and to overcome them, while at the same time running barefoot through broken glass, dodging machine gun fire, and leaping into fifty-story elevator shafts.
No Goal, No Yardstick
If you don’t provide your protagonist with a driving deep-seated need that he believes his quest will fulfill, the things that happen will feel random; they won’t add up to anything. Without knowing what he wants, or what his issue is, “There is no there, there,” as Gertrude Stein so famously said (okay, she was talking about Oakland, California, but still). Without it, there’s no yardstick by which to measure your pilgrim’s progress, no context to give it meaning.
As a result, it’s impossible to envision the coming chain of events—that is, the story itself. It’s like watching football with no idea what the rules are, or how points are scored, or even that it’s a game at all. Imagine that the protagonist, Hank, a massive man in a padded spandex uniform, catches a prolate spheroid (you wouldn’t know it was a football). Suddenly, a whole bunch of other spandex-clad bruisers are rushing toward him. Now what? Should he run to the right, run to the left, throw it to the guy in the red uniform? Bury it, maybe? If you don’t know what the objective is, everything appears random. The action doesn’t add up, so there’s nothing to follow, which makes it impossible to anticipate what will happen next. It is anticipation that creates the intoxicating sense of momentum that hooks a reader, so stories without it remain unread.
Making Meaningful Connections—Does It Add Up?
Before we dive deeper, it’s important to keep one thing in mind. It’s something we live by when we read but tend to forget as writers: readers assume that everything the writer tells them is there on a strictly need-to-know basis. Our assumption is that if we don’t need to know it, the writer won’t waste precious time telling us about it. We trust that each piece of information, each event, each observation, matters—right down to how the protagonist’s hometown is described, the amount of hair gel he uses, and how scuffed his shoes are—and that it will have a story consequence or give us insight we need in order to grasp what’s happening. If it turns out that it doesn’t matter, we do one of two things: (1) we lose interest, or (2) we try to invent a consequence or meaning. This only postpones our loss of interest, which is then mingled with annoyance, because we’ve invested energy trying to figure out what the writer was getting at, when the truth is, she wasn’t getting at anything.
But by figuring out what your protagonist wants, and the inner issue she’ll have to overcome to get it, you can shape her quest with a confidence born of knowing you have a sturdy framework to guide you. For example: Wanda wants love, so her goal is to find the perfect boyfriend or, barring that, a nice golden retriever, preferably one who’s good at fetch. This then becomes the story’s single overriding objective and—you guessed it—the story question: will Wanda find love, human or otherwise? This is the info we’re hunting for when we begin reading a novel. It’s what tells us how the protagonist will react to what happens. So when Seth makes goo-goo eyes at Wanda, we’ll know her heart is swelling, whereas if she wasn’t so desperate for love, she’d surely see him for the sappy fool we know he is.
But of course there is a wee bit more to it than that. We still don’t know what her inner issue is. Remember, it is the job of a story to dig beneath the surface and decipher life, not just to present it. Stories illuminate the meaning the protagonist reads into events that, in real life, would not be so easy to understand. Julian Barnes sums it up nicely: “Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.”8
In this case, what needs to be explained is why the protagonist wants what she wants, what it means to her, and what getting it will cost her. It’s this that we, as readers, “try on for size.” Cognitive psychology professor and novelist Keith Oatley puts it this way: “In literature we feel the pain of the downtrodden, the anguish of defeat, or the joy of victory, but in a safe space.… We can refine our human capacities of emotional understanding. We can hone our ability to feel with other people who, in ordinary life, might seem too foreign—or too threatening—to elicit our sympathies. Perhaps, then, when we return to our real lives, we can better understand why people act the way they do.”9 Or put more simply, as the aggravated newsreel producer barked at the beginning of Citizen Kane, “Nothing is ever better than finding out what makes people tick.” Because with that comes the predictive power of knowing when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, and when to run for cover.