by Lisa Cron
From there Deb’s story seems pretty clear-cut: it’s the tale of a conflicted woman whose husband has lost interest in her and is probably heading out for greener pastures. Or is he? Because so far, all we have is her side. What about Rick’s? Could part of what Deb needs to overcome be a fundamental misunderstanding of what Rick’s agenda actually is?
Case in Point: The Threadbare Heart
The foundation of a story is often rooted in just this kind of misinterpretation, which arises from the fact that because Deb isn’t a literal mind reader, she interprets what her mirror neurons tell her based on her own understanding of the world and what she’d mean if she were Rick. We all do it. Someone does or says something that sounds hurtful, and we’re hurt. But sometimes that hurtful utterance, which can trigger a story’s arc, turns out to mean the exact opposite of what the protagonist thought it did.
Jennie Nash’s keenly insightful novel, The Threadbare Heart, turns on just such a natural misunderstanding. The protagonist, Lily, has been married to Tom for over twenty-five years. It’s been a good marriage, and Lily believes she knows Tom deeply and that their bond is solid. On page five, however, feeling safe, secure, and happy, she decides to risk having a bit of chocolate, knowing it might trigger one of her debilitating migraines. Noticing, Tom demands to know what she’s doing, and she tells him not to worry: she’ll deal with the consequences should she get a headache. She’s stunned when he then angrily informs her in no uncertain terms that her headaches are his problem and always have been, at which point he stomps out. Suddenly, she’s not sure if she knows him as well as she thought she did, and the world feels like a far more dangerous place. The reader, too, immediately shares Lily’s unease—for about four pages. And then on page nine, Tom reflects on what happened:
Lily’s headaches were something he had handled for years without complaint. But the last few times, they had grabbed hold of him in a way that frightened him. He had imagined Lily spiraling further down into pain than she had ever gone before, spiraling so far away that she was out of reach. It made him think about her dying and his being alone. That wasn’t something he felt like he could endure.11
This is a clear case of the “why” changing the surface meaning of an event by 180 degrees (which is exactly the sort of info readers are hungry for). What motivated Tom’s outburst is the opposite of what, at first blush, it appeared to be. It wasn’t that Tom was angry at Lily for risking a headache; it was that he loved her so much, he couldn’t bear anything—including her own pain—that might take her away from him. Ironically, Lily does know Tom as well as she thought she did, but now she’s not so sure. She no longer knows how much her husband loves her, but we do. And so as she struggles with it over the course of the novel, we’re able to gauge her progress against what we know are Tom’s true feelings for her. This is possible only because we are aware of not only Lily’s agenda, but of Tom’s as well.
It is this kind of glimpse into someone else’s hopes and fears that makes stories so compelling—and so much more than mere entertainment. It’s hard to understand what other people want from us. It’s hard to know what we truly want for ourselves (well, besides another piece of that salted caramel chocolate). Stories not only give us much-needed practice in figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.
CHAPTER 4: CHECKPOINT
Do you know what your protagonist wants? What does she desire most? What is her agenda, her raison d’être?
Do you know why your protagonist wants what he wants? What does achieving his goal mean to him, specifically? Do you know why? In short, what’s his motivation?
Do you know what your protagonist’s external goal is? What specific goal does his desire catapult him toward? Beware of simply shoving him into a generic “bad situation” just to see what he will do. Remember, achieving his goal must fulfill a longstanding need or desire—and force him to face a deep-seated fear in the process.
Do you know what your protagonist’s internal goal is? One way of arriving at this is to ask yourself, What does achieving her external goal mean to her? How does she think it will affect how she sees herself? What does she think it will say about her? Is she right? Or is her internal goal at odds with her external goal?
Does your protagonist’s goal force her to face a specific longstanding problem or fear? What secret terror must she face to get there? What deeply held belief will she have to question? What has she spent her whole life avoiding that she now must either look straight in the eye or wave the white flag of defeat?
WHEN I WAS FIVE, I closed my eyes and thought really hard about whether I was now invisible. After all, I couldn’t see anything, so how could anyone see me? Yes, I concluded: I had indeed vanished. It made perfect sense, and it was thrilling to boot. I felt very smart. And why not? Being wrong feels exactly like being right, as journalist and self-proclaimed “wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz so brilliantly points out in her book Being Wrong. I spent days plotting how to walk blindfolded through the kitchen without bumping into anything, the better to secretly borrow a few cookies. That is, until I heard my mother asking what the heck I was doing with my hand in the cookie jar—which opened my eyes, both literally and figuratively.
Being wrong changes how we see—or don’t see—the world. And we’re wrong a lot, partly because in order to survive, we’re wired to draw conclusions about everything we see, whether or not we have all—or any—of the facts; and partly because, more often than not, it’s our cognitive unconscious that deftly constructs the implicit beliefs that then organize and rule our world.1 So while it may be cold comfort, being wrong usually isn’t our fault, at least not in the “you know damn well what you did” sense. Most times, we have no clue. According to neuropsychologist Justin Barrett, our implicit or “nonreflective” beliefs are our default mode, constantly working behind the scenes to shape memory and experience.2
As a result, from the moment one of those erroneous implicit beliefs is formed—everyone’s only in it for themselves, so the nicer someone is, the more you know they’re out to con you—we blithely misinterpret everything that happens to us. Everyone here is so nice—I better watch my back. And the scary thing is, we don’t even know we’re doing it until something happens that proves us wrong, and suddenly our implicit belief is catapulted into our conscious mind, where we have to either deal with it or work overtime to rationalize it away.3
Stories often begin at just that moment, as one of the protagonist’s long-held beliefs is about to be called into question. Sometimes that belief is what stands between her and something she really wants. Sometimes it’s what’s keeping her from doing the right thing. Sometimes it’s what she has to confront to get out of a bad situation before it’s too late. But make no mistake, it’s her struggle with this “internal issue” that drives the story forward. In fact, the plot itself is cleverly constructed to systematically back her into a corner where she has no choice but to face it or fold up her tent and go home. The events relentlessly cajole and coax her to reexamine her past, which often looks—and feels—very different in retrospect. It’s the same way that in life the present continually prods us to reassess our autobiographical selves, and as a result, past “events acquire new emotional weights … [and] facts acquire new significance.”4 Or as T. S. Eliot so aptly noted, “The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”5
Which brings us to a trick question: when you’re writing a story, where is the best place to start? No, the answer isn’t at the beginning, on page one, or even, sitting at my desk. The best place to start working on a story is long before your poor unsuspecting protagonist shows up on page one. The best place to start is by pinpointing the moment long before, when she first fell prey to the inner issue that’s been skewing her worldview ever since.
That’s why in this chapter, we’ll tackle something writers often shy away from: the notion of getting to know their characters be
fore they tell their story. To that end we’ll examine the very important pros and the trivial cons of outlining (how’s that for a great example of editorializing?); why it’s important to write focused character biographies that, happily, often beget outlines on their own; and why an exhaustive character bio can be more damaging than not writing one at all. And then, lest we get lost in the conceptual, we’ll run though an example of just how it’s done.
You Can’t Fix It If It Ain’t Broke
Stories are about people dealing with problems they can’t avoid—sounds so elementary, doesn’t it? Why, then, do writers so often leap in without knowing what, exactly, the protagonist’s problem actually is? Often it’s because they’re hoping it’ll become clear if they just start writing. But if you don’t know what’s broke, how can you write a story about fixing it? Which is why the second most-frequent editorial note that writers get, right after, “Uh, what’s this story about, anyway?” is “Why now?” as in, why does the story start at this minute as opposed to yesterday, tomorrow, or when Aunt Bertha gets back from bingo?
Ironically, often the same writer who swears that it would crush her creativity to pause to outline or work out character bios will start the story at the exact spot in the protagonist’s past where, instead, she should be digging; that is, at the moment his worldview was knocked out of alignment, along with the inception of the desire it thus thwarts. What she doesn’t realize is that the story itself actually begins much later, when those two long-dormant opposites come to a head, giving the protagonist no choice but to take action. This concept is elegantly summed up by, ahem, the Oracle to Optimus Prime in the animated TV show The Transformers: Beast Machines: “The seeds of the future lie buried in the past.”6
Does this mean you really have to outline your story first? Sure sounds like it. But like everything else, it’s relative. Let’s take a look at the arguments for and against.
The Great Outlining Debate
Many very successful authors swear the only way they can write is to jump in cold on page one, armed with nothing but the vaguest notion of where they’re going. For them, the kick is to uncover the story as they write it. If they’ve already figured it out, the thrill is gone and the actual writing feels redundant.
For instance, there is the legendary (read: probably apocryphal) story of Edith Wharton who, after a manuscript she’d just completed was lost in a fire, told her editor that she couldn’t possibly rewrite it, because she already knew the ending. In this Robert Frost concurs: “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”7 Ditto Robert B. Parker, who says he has no idea where the story is going when he starts writing.8
And then there’s the other school, with members like Katherine Anne Porter, whose philosophy is Ms. Wharton’s polar opposite: “If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin.”9 Or how about none other than J. K. Rowling, who had very carefully plotted all seven Harry Potter books by 1992—when she began writing the first one.10 “I spent an awful lot of time thinking about the details of the world and working it out in depth,” she says. “I always have a base plot outline.”11
Is either camp right? Or does this simply illustrate that it’s up to each writer to decide whether outlining fits into his or her writing process and leave it at that? Probably. Then again, there’s another way to look at it. Some lucky pups are simply born with a natural sense of story, the way some people have perfect pitch. They can toss off a laundry list and it comes out so nuanced and moving that you’re weeping over the plight of poorly sorted socks. If you’re one of those writers, you don’t need me. Go forth and prosper! But most writers—including most successful writers—benefit from puttering around in their protagonist’s past before tackling (or, having learned their lesson, rewriting) page one. Especially because it helps avoid two major pitfalls:
1. The most common problem with stories that haven’t been outlined is that they don’t build. How can they? Without a premeditated destination based on the battle between the protagonist’s inner issue and his longstanding desire, they wander, taking the scenic route to who-knows-where. Thus, when the writer begins revising, something seminal needs to happen on, oh, about page two. And once it does, everything that follows becomes largely irrelevant. Which basically translates to what’s known as a “page-one rewrite”—think of it as pretty much starting from scratch.
2. Hey, many writers think, no biggie. I expect to rewrite. Everyone says that’s a huge part of the process anyway. Very true. But in this case there’s a much bigger problem. It’s extremely difficult to acknowledge that the first draft has been rendered largely moot. It’s one of those hard-to-admit mistakes we were talking about, the kind we tend to work overtime rationalizing down to size. Thus new material is crafted first and foremost with an eye toward how it will fit into what’s already there, because our unconscious allegiance is to what we’ve already written, rather than to the story itself. Ironically, the “new” draft is often a big step backward—what was flat in the prior version remains flat, now it just makes less sense.
Have I convinced you to give outlining a chance? Good. But before visions of rigid Roman numeral outlines fill your head—or worse, the thought of plowing through one of those endless one-size-fits-all “character questionnaires”—let me reassure you that outlining can be an intuitive, creative, and inspiring process. Not to mention one that’s often surprisingly shorter than you might think. Let’s take a look at why.
MYTH: You Can Get to Know Your Characters Only by Writing Complete Bios
REALITY: Character Bios Should Concentrate Solely on Information Relevant to Your Story
When it comes to getting to know your characters, there is definitely such a thing as Too Much Information. We’re not talking about details that are way too personal. In a story, way too personal is a good thing. But irrelevant is not. Yet writers are often told that in order to really get to know their characters, they must fill out a detailed character questionnaire longer than the book itself, answering questions like these (and for the record, I’m not making these up):
• Does he like his middle name?
• If she’s stretching out in her backyard to sun herself, what kind of towel does she lie on?
• Does she have a favorite room?
• What color evokes strong memories for her?
• Does he have a birthmark?
• Does he have matching china?
• If he has a birthmark, is it by any chance in the shape of China? (Okay, I made that one up.)
• What is his opinion on euthanasia?
Now while the answers to all these questions might indeed be interesting, chances are they won’t have anything to do with your story. The same goes for writing a general from-birth-to-the-present bio. The whole point of a story is to filter out the kind of unnecessary information such bios are full of. The trouble is, long character bios tend to be so all-encompassing that, ironically, they obscure the very info you’re looking for. Here’s the secret: you are looking only for information that pertains to the story you’re telling. If a story is about a problem, then what you’re looking for is the root of the problem that will blossom on page one. This means that if the fact that Betty is a virtuoso harpist doesn’t enter into or affect the story, you don’t need to make note of the grueling years she spent mastering the harp. Because if you do, you’re likely to then waste time agonizing over where this fact should pop up in the story (when the truth is, it shouldn’t), or worse, writing an entire subplot so Betty can show off her harp-playing skills at a holiday office party, which, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the story you’re telling, stops it cold. To add insult to injury, the harp problem doesn’t end there; it lingers in the reader’s mind, leaving him wondering, Gee, I wonder where that harp playing thing is leading.
That’s why, when writing your protagonist’s bio, the goal is to pinpoint two things: the event in his past that knocked his worldview out of alignment, triggering the
internal issue that keeps him from achieving his goal; and the inception of his desire for the goal itself. Sometimes they’re one and the same. For instance, in It’s a Wonderful Life, this telltale moment is when George watches his father being beaten down by Potter. This leads George to believe that he can’t be a success if he stays in Bedford Falls (skewing his worldview) and spurs him to want to be the success his father wasn’t, by building big things somewhere else. The story then forces him to reassess his worldview until he slowly realizes that it—and his external goal—have been way off the mark.
While in many stories we wouldn’t actually see this “telltale” scene, it’s often referenced while the protagonist struggles with the havoc it wreaks on his life. It may not even be mentioned at all, its presence merely implied by his actions. So, although the reader doesn’t see it, they feel its effect, because you, the writer, understood it so clearly that you were able to weave it through everything the protagonist does.