by Lisa Cron
And that, my friends, is why, when it comes to digressions, heartless as it may seem, you have to kill them before they kill your story. I suspect this is what Mark Twain meant when he said, “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out.”17
It pays to remain hypervigilant, because digressions come in all shapes and sizes. They can be misplaced flashbacks, they can be subplots that have nothing to do with the story itself, and they can be itty bitty. A digression is any piece of information that we don’t need and therefore don’t know what to do with.
Arm yourself with the knowledge that everything in a story must be there for a story reason; it must be something that, given the cause-and-effect trajectory, the reader needs to know, at that moment. Thus there is a question you must ruthlessly ask about every last scrap in your story: “And so?”
Because if you don’t ask it, the reader will.
The “And So?” Test
When you ask “And so?” you’re testing for story relevance. What does this piece of information tell us that we need to know? What’s the point? How does it further the story? What consequence does it lead to? If you can answer these questions, great. But often the answer is “Um, it doesn’t.”
For instance, imagine if in It’s a Wonderful Life there was suddenly a scene in which George Bailey learns to fly fish. You’d scratch your head, thinking, “And I need to know that—why?” Perhaps you’d even wonder if it was meant as a metaphor—something about the old “Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself forever” parable, maybe? And while you debated this, chances are you’d miss the bit where Uncle Billy absently wraps the eight grand in his newspaper and accidentally tosses it onto Potter’s lap, so for a long time after that, nothing would make sense. Thus, even though George might have had a great time fly fishing, we do not need to know about it. The fly fishing scene fails the “And so?” test, which is no doubt why Frank Capra wisely kept it to himself.
What about your story? Does it sometimes toddle off in interesting yet irrelevant directions likely to thwart the readers’ hardwired need to sense—if not see—the causal connections? Why not break out the red pen and have at it? Don’t be shy. You might want to keep Samuel Johnson’s advice to writers tucked in the back of your mind as you slash and burn: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”18
CHAPTER 8: CHECKPOINT
Does your story follow a cause-and-effect trajectory beginning on page one, so that each scene is triggered by the one that preceded it? It’s like setting up a line of dominoes—you tap that first one, and they all fall in perfect order as each scene puts the “decision” made in the prior scene to the test.
Does everything in your story’s cause-and-effect trajectory revolve around the protagonist’s quest (the story question)? If it doesn’t, get rid of it. It’s that easy.
Are your story’s external events (the plot) spurred by the protagonist’s evolving internal cause-and-effect trajectory? We don’t care about a hurricane, a stock market crash, or aliens taking over planet Earth unless it somehow directly affects your protagonist’s quest.
When your protagonist makes a decision, is it always clear how she arrived at it, especially when she’s changing her mind about something? Don’t forget, just because you know what your protagonist is thinking doesn’t mean your readers will.
Does each scene follow the action, reaction, decision pattern? It’s like the one, two, three of a waltz. Get that rhythm stuck in your head—action, reaction, decision—and then use it to build momentum.
Can you answer the “And so?” to everything in the story? Ask this question relentlessly, like a four-year-old, and the minute you can’t answer, know that you’re likely in the company of a darling, a digression, or something else likely to cause your story to go into free fall.
THERE’S AN OLD SAYING: good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. The trouble is, bad judgment can be deadly. It can lead you to ignore that funny squeak every time you hit the brakes, put off checking out that odd-shaped mole on your big toe, decide to invest every penny with that clever guy whose hedge fund always turns a hefty profit. Even worse, bad judgment can derail your social life—which is a much bigger deal than we often realize. As neuroscientist Richard Restak says, “We are social creatures, the need to belong is as basic to our survival as our need for food and oxygen.”1 So, since there are countless tricky situations in which good judgment comes in awfully handy, often the best—not to mention safest—experience to learn from is someone else’s. Could this be where story came from?
It’s a question neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary biologists spend a lot of time pondering: considering that the brain is always working overtime to figure out what’s safe and what isn’t, why would it permit us to put the oft-sneaky “real world” on hold and get lost in a story?2 The brain never does anything it doesn’t have to, so as neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga notes, the fact that “there seems to be a reward system that allows us to enjoy good fiction, implies that there is a benefit to the fictional experience.”3
What is the benefit, survival-wise, that led to the neural rush of enjoyment a good story unleashes, effectively disconnecting us from the otherwise incessant Sturm und Drang of daily life? The answer is clear: it lets us sit back and vicariously experience someone else suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the better to learn how to dodge those darts should they ever be aimed at us.
As Steven Pinker says, in a story, “The author places a fictitious character in a hypothetical situation in an otherwise real world where ordinary facts and laws hold, and allows the reader to explore the consequences.”4 Since we’re wired to feel what the protagonist feels as if it were happening to us, when it comes to experience, this is as close as we’re going to get to having our cake and eating it too. Which, of course, is precisely the point.
This means the protagonist is a guinea pig, and whether we like it or not, guinea pigs suffer so we don’t have to. But although guinea pigs have PETA to champion their rights, protagonists are on their own—and trouble really is their middle name. “For example,” cognitive psychologists Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar write, “a difficult breakup between a literary protagonist and his or her beloved cannot help but lead us to explore what it would be like were we in the same position. This knowledge is an asset when the time comes for us to cope with such an event in our own lives.”5
The catch is, your protagonist really truly does have to suffer—otherwise not only will she have nothing to teach us, but we won’t have much reason to care about what happens to her, either. Like everything in life, this is much easier said than done. That’s why in this chapter we’ll explore why you’re actually doing your protagonist a favor by setting her up for a fall (or three or four); why in literary fiction, the protagonist must suffer even more than in a commercial potboiler; how to make sure your protagonist’s trouble builds; and why some writers find it impossible to be mean to their protagonist. Finally, we’ll go through eleven devious ways to undermine your characters’ best-laid plans.
No Pain, No Gain
Have you ever suspected that maybe, just maybe, in some small, relatively inconsequential way, you might be just a tiny bit of a sadist? Good. Because as much as you love your protagonist, your goal is to craft a plot that forces her to confront head-on just about everything she’s spent her entire life avoiding. You have to make sure the harder she tries, the harder it gets. Her good deeds will rarely go unpunished. Sure, every now and then it’ll seem like everything’s okay, but that’s only because you’re setting her up for an even bigger fall. You want her to relax and let her guard down a little, the better to wallop her when she least expects it. You never want to give her the benefit of the doubt, regardless of how much you feel she’s earned it. Because if you do, the one thing she won’t earn is her status as a hero.
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nbsp; The irony is, you aren’t being a sadist at all. You’re doing it for her own good, because you want her to, as they used to say back in elementary school, live up to her true potential. For that she needs your unflinching help. Sure, everyone says they want to be the best they can be—tomorrow or the next day, you know, when the time is right. Hooey. There’s no right time; there’s only now. And right now, your job is to see that circumstances beyond your protagonist’s control fling her out of her easy chair and into the fray. A story is an escalating dare, and its goal is to make sure your protagonist is worthy of her goal. This means that, as difficult as it may be, when it comes to the care and feeding of your protagonist, you have to be mean to her. Hold her soles to the fire, even when she starts to squirm. Even after she cries, “Uncle!” After all, the last thing you want is a hero who is all hat and no cattle.
But wait, you may be thinking, that’s just true of commercial fiction, isn’t it? Commercial fiction, they say, is plot driven, so lots of stuff has to happen, and it has to build and have consequences. Literary novels don’t really need something as contrived and surface as an actual plot, since they’re character driven. Slice of life and all that. Right?
Actually, wrong. Very wrong, in fact.
MYTH: Literary Novels Are Character Driven, So They Don’t Need a Plot
REALITY: A Literary Novel Has Just As Much Plot As a Mass Market Potboiler, If Not More
Since serious literature is less prone to “big” events than commercial fiction is, it is actually more in need of a well-constructed plot than anything Jackie Collins ever dreamed of. In literary fiction the plot must be far more layered, intricate, and finely woven in order to illuminate subtler and more nuanced themes. Character-driven novels rely a lot less on sinking ships, falling meteors, and tidal waves, and a lot more on a missed gesture, a quick nod, a moment’s hesitation—which in the hands of a great writer can feel more earth shattering than a nine-point earthquake. But make no mistake: literary fiction still revolves around an escalating series of challenges that the protagonist must brave, because no matter how keenly honed the protagonist, he still has to want something real bad. And if that desire doesn’t put him to the test—yes, just as in a potboiler, it’s baptism by fire—then he, and the narrative he inhabits, will remain flat and uninvolving. Remember: a story revolves around events that force the protagonist to come to grips with a difficult inner issue—which, ironically, is something literary novels are far more geared to convey. So don’t fall prey to this tired old saw; instead, kick it to the curb—poetically, if you must.
Case Study: Sullivan’s Travels—The Evolution of a Bumpy Night
Okay, we’ve admitted that yes, no matter how much we love our protagonist, if he wants to be the center of attention in an actual story, he’s going to be in for a bumpy night. How bumpy? At first, not very. In the beginning the protagonist’s quest tends to look easy—to him, that is. It has to. Because just like in life, if he knew the buckets of blood, sweat, and tears his hard-won triumph would require, he probably wouldn’t even get out of bed. Luckily neither we, nor our protagonist, ever know how hard it’s going to be. Take, for instance, John L. Sullivan, the privileged young film director and protagonist of Preston Sturges’s classic 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels. Tired of directing successful yet meaningless pieces of fluff—and you only have to hear the title of his latest film, Hey-Hey in the Hayloft, to get the picture—Sully wants to direct a serious drama. “I want this to be a picture of dignity … a true canvas of the suffering of humanity,” he says, brushing off his worried producer’s hopeful question, “But with a little sex in it?”6
When it’s pointed out to Sully that he has no actual experience in suffering of any kind, he instantly agrees, but instead of giving up, he decides there’s a simple solution. He’ll suffer. How hard can it be? So he goes to the wardrobe department, picks out sufficiently raggedy clothes (which he dons with his butler’s help), then hitchhikes out of town with a dime in his pocket. But rather than suffering, he experiences only mild annoyance at the hands of a middle-aged man-crazy widow and soon finds himself back in Hollywood.
Realizing this suffering business isn’t as easy as poor people make it seem, he sets out again. But the studio, now worried that he might actually find the trouble he’s so determined to get into, insists that a large mobile home chock full of “babysitters” follows him—just in case. This time the only thing he suffers is fools. When this doesn’t work, Sully balks and ups the ante, hitting the road again, at last riding the rails with actual hobos. Now he sees genuine suffering and devastating poverty. He sleeps on the floor; he goes hungry. But there’s a big difference between being poor and being broke, especially when back home, you’re rich. Strike three. This time his plan doesn’t work because he’s too uncomfortable to stay uncomfortable long enough to get the hang of it.
Now Sully really is ready to throw in the towel, return to Hollywood, and sort things out. Everything he tried backfired, so what’s the use? Besides, he’s begun to suspect that there’s something sordid about being a voyeur at the table of human suffering. It feels too much like tempting fate. And in the-beware-of-what-you-wish-for category, that’s exactly when life steps in and raises the stakes, big time. A hobo steals Sully’s shoes—one of which has a studio ID card sewn into the sole—and is pulverized by a railroad train. The cops, finding the ID card, announce that Sully is dead.
However, the actual Sully has been beaten and robbed of the five-dollar bills he’d been giving out to the hobos before returning to Hollywood. In a stupor, he assaults a railroad cop and is arrested. He tells them who he is, fully expecting that to be that. But without ID, and the headlines full of the news of his death, who would believe him? No one. Sully is convicted and sent to a prison work camp where, at last, life bestows upon him the very experience he’d been seeking: human suffering without an escape clause. Goal met. Now, when he gets back to Hollywood, he’ll have the know-how to make a picture about genuine human suffering.
Except the lesson he ultimately learns is the exact opposite of what he’d expected. Because now he knows firsthand that the last thing suffering people want to watch is more people suffering. What they want is a break from suffering. They want to laugh, and for a moment forget about everything that’s wrong in their lives. They want to watch movies like Hey-Hey in the Hayloft and feel how wonderfully silly life can be.
And so, in the end, because everything that could go wrong, did—and then some—Sully has the experience that a perfect story bestows upon its protagonist: he returns to the place where he began and sees it with new eyes. The world didn’t change. He did.
Had writer-director Sturges shown Sully mercy, the film could have ended when Sully realized that, try as he might, there’s just no way he’d ever have a clue what it feels like to be disenfranchised. And hey, he did try pretty hard, didn’t he? So it would have been a job well done, right? Nope. Because until Sully finds himself in prison with no way out, everything has been on his terms. And a test on your own terms is no test at all. Sturges knew this, so rather than swooping in at the eleventh hour and saving Sully from the chain gang, he stepped back and let life have a whack at him. In so doing, he actually did Sully a huge favor. As the saying goes, “No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.” Only by making sure Sully was extremely afflicted did Sturges give him the opportunity to become a better man.
The Importance of Hurting the One You Love
While getting writers to punch, shoot, stab, and otherwise rough up their protagonist can be difficult, there’s something even harder to get them to do: embarrass their hero. After all, a punch is a punch; it’s physical, external—once the sting fades and the wound heals, it’s usually gone and forgotten. What’s more, physical pain is something one can keep to oneself. No one else has to know. But to embarrass someone? That’s public. Unlike physical pain, embarrassment says something about you
—it means that you not only made a mistake, but that you were found out. Social pain—embarrassment, mortification, shame—lingers; the full measure of its sting tends to be felt afresh every time you think about it, even though decades may have passed.7 It’s no surprise the word mortify originally meant “to die,” because that’s often exactly what we want to do when we’re embarrassed.
It also tends to be the thing that best spurs growth.
So it’s a pity that embarrassment, mortification, and shame are the last thing writers want to put their protagonist through. We don’t need to read Pygmalion to know writers and artists have a tendency to fall for their creations. So, without meaning to, they’re always smoothing the way for him, pitching softballs—sort of like an attentive director always making sure the camera only catches the star’s “good side.” In real life, it’s bad form to put someone in an awkward situation—worse still, to then point the finger at him and make sure everyone notices.