The Heart of the Story

I teach a workshop at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto called “Finding Your Story,” the basic idea of which is to help people dig through the clutter, confusion, and anxiety of writing to find what they’re really trying to say and the best way to say it. These are the notes I start the work off with and keep coming back to over the eight weeks of the class...and that I keep rechecking at myself, because one of the traps of this writing business is how easy it is to forget the basics while navigating all the little details.

For starters: you can’t know how to say it unless you know what you’re saying.
       And if you really want to know how to say it, it’s best to know why you’re saying it. If you’re writing to communicate—that is, hoping someone else reads it and gets something out of it—then you probably want to bring something to someone that they’ve never known or thought about or quite seen in that way before. Ask yourself who you want to be saying it to (roughly). But, even more importantly, ask yourself why it matters to you to put the time and effort into saying it.
       Knowing what you want to say can be a lot harder than it sounds; when most of us come up with a story idea we’re not thinking in those terms. We usually start with a situation we want to capture or a character we want to describe or a plot idea we want to play with. But deep down, there almost certainly is something we really want to say. These ideas are speaking to us for some reason. The work of this class is largely about going inside to discover (or remember) that reason.
       In order to find your story:
       Simplify.
       Find the heart of it.
       See your story as one whole entity, not a series of events.
       A good story is organic, not a structure of brick or timber. It’s one living thing, every cell growing from the original seed, and it needs all its components to keep it alive.
       A story is also a river. Elements come together into a single course that carries us to its destination. It’s not a series of pieces, it’s a single flow. The substance at the start becomes the substance in the middle and then the substance at the end.

      (Or, if you want to play with lame physics analogies, a story is like light: it’s a particle and it’s a wave, depending on how you’re looking at it at the moment.)
      Your job is to discover that organism and that river. I say “discover” and not “create,” because when the pieces come together I usually feel as though I’ve unearthed something—or liberated something or breathed life into something—that was there all along. Our ideas, and the way they connect our scattered experiences, thoughts, and feelings, nearly always hold the implication of a story within them. The more I feel I’m inventing something, the more likely I am to be going off course.
       Which isn’t to say that that you’re not going to be doing a lot of conscious creating and decision making. My gut feelings help me understand whether something works or not, but I usually have to do some thinking and analyzing to narrow my options enough for my gut to have something to work with. There’s a lot of “what if I try this?” before I get to “okay, right.”
       Beware of thinking, though. It can be treacherous. Our thinky brains love to run and play, but sometimes they need to be brought back to focus. I’ve found that exercises like the ones I’m assigning to you help with that focus.
        For that matter, beware of writing. Writing can fool you. Your own fun prose and clever inventions can distract you from noticing that you’re not sure where you’re going. A snazzy scene can pave over a gaping hole in your story—for the moment. Soon enough, though, that hole’s going to show up again.
       So your first job, before you can simplify your story, is to simplify the job itself.
       The most useful tool I’ve developed in my decades as a writer: anxiety reduction. And the best tool for anxiety reduction I’ve found—better than solitude, better than breathing exercises, better than Xanax, better than bourbon—is task reduction.
       One of the tricky parts about writing stories is that they contain so many elements that we can find ourselves trying to stay on top of ten things at once. Tone, structure, plot, character, voice, how we’re going to end it, the scene we’re working on, the scene coming up, and that scene fifty pages ago that still doesn’t feel right. Which summons those two unwelcome visitors so well known to every writer: confusion and anxiety.
        Pick one aspect of the story to work on at a time. In this class, you get to work on finding the heart of the story and put all the rest on the shelf. For the moment, stop asking yourself how the story should begin and how much should be in flashback and how to make your protagonist more sympathetic and whether it’s going to be funny or sad. Those questions will still be there when you come back to them, and you’ll probably discover that the answers will be much easier to find once you understand your story better.
       In fact, I’ve often found that a lot of those answers become not only easier but obvious. Now that I know what I’m saying and where I’m going, some choices become simply inevitable. Which is a wonderful feeling: one less thing to agonize over.
       Which brings me, at last, to the first exercise: Try to tell your story in briefer and briefer forms without losing its emotional, intellectual, and thematic essence. You can lose plot mechanics and details of milieu—in fact, you’re going to have to—but keep your eye on the essence of what you’re saying. Start by telling it in under 200 words. Then bring it under 100. Then 50.
       To keep this from getting too abstract, here are the “hearts” I’ve found in some other people’s stories, told in roughly 40 or 45 words. Mind you, these aren’t intended as literary criticism. I know they’re oversimplified. But I think they’ll help you get what I’m saying:

•    “A woman is so caught up in romantic dreams that she can’t appreciate her unglamorous but steady husband and throws herself into a disastrous affair that brings such disgrace upon her family and herself that she commits suicide.” (Madame Bovary)

•    “A boy who wants to feel worthwhile creates something that makes him a big deal for a while but then lets him down, forcing him to learn that he can only feel worthwhile by living his own life.” (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)

•    “A bunch of sheltered aristocrats are lost in assorted self-preoccupations and existential riddles until they have to defend their nation from an invader, tossing them back on the basics of life, death, and love, enabling them to see the hand of God in human events.” (War and Peace)

•     “A people build a vast, secure empire but over time focus more on personal or otherworldly rewards and fail to teach their offspring civic virtues, so more and more of the running of the empire is handed over to foreigners who eventually pull it apart.” (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)

•    “A man is abandoned by his lover and detaches himself cynically from human affairs. When she returns he learns she left him for a higher cause. He seduces her away from her cause, until through his love for her he realizes that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” (You know!)

Note that each one starts by telling you clearly who the story is about. (That’s usually one person, but stories can be about multiple people, or whole nations, too.) Then it tells you what the protagonist’s initial situation is, which usually means what’s wrong with his or her or their situation. Then it tells you what they try to do about it: affairs, superheroes, wars, foreign mercenaries, seductions. Then it gives you a sense of how that goes and where, through reacting—or failing to react—the protagonists end up.
        Note also: these summaries don’t sound all that interesting. All the catchy twists and offbeat milieux, all the dazzling touches of the authors, have been left out. This exercise isn’t about writing a springboard or an elevator pitch or a back-cover blurb. Your boiled-down story not only doesn’t have to sound exciting, I promise you it almost certainly won’t sound exciting. I’ll even say that it shouldn’t, at this point. What it should sound is clear and solid.
       In this exercise, don’t be afraid of simplicity. Simplicity is your friend.
        In finished writing (as we’ve all heard a million times), it’s usually important to show more than tell. But for this exercise: tell, don’t show.
       Don’t be afraid of your story sounding too familiar, either. The basic stories have all been told countless times and people will be telling them again forever. Good human stories will always feel as though we’ve heard them before. Which means your  summary may sound trite when you first read it. Banal, even. But no more banal than my summary of Madame Bovary, which isn’t bad company.
       It’s what you ultimately do with the story that will make it new and unique. And you’re not going to think about that now, remember? It will be much less frightening to do something dazzling with a story once you’re very clear on what the story is, because then you won’t be freaking out about technique and content at the same time. (Anxiety reduction: your other friend.)
       You’ll also note that these summaries all include the end of the story. Not the specifics. We don’t know that she swallowed arsenic, he admitted he was gay, Moscow was burned, the Vandals sacked Rome, and Louie rounded up the usual suspects. But we know whether our protagonists succeeded or failed in what they wanted and we have a sense of how they changed or what they learned.
        So when you summarize, include the ending, as best you understand it now. You’re not marrying it; you may change it completely as your understanding grows. But you won’t really know your story unless you know where it goes. It’s the end that makes clear the meaning of the whole thing. It’s the end that determines what you’re saying to us.
       There were two basic possible endings to Casablanca: Rick gives up Ilsa so she can help Laszlo; or Rick wins Ilsa away from him. Those two endings create different themes: a great cause matters more than any romance; or a great love matters more than any cause. They’re both worth telling. Just know which one you want. 
       The ending trumps everything else. You can have every character telling us that great causes matter more than romance, and countless moments throughout the movie supporting the same idea; but if Ilsa stays in Casablanca with Rick, then you’ve told us that, really, the romance matters more than the cause. If your ending doesn’t line up with the intent that’s implicit from the beginning, then  you’re not saying what you think you’re saying. And if you try to say contradictory things at once, your readers come away confused and dissatisfied.
       (This goes back to what I said about the story as an organism. I’ve never found the “beginning-middle-and-end” description of stories very useful. Isn’t the end implicit in the beginning? And the beginning still continuing to the end? How do you separate the “middle” from either? Once separated, how do you keep it from becoming just a receptacle for narrative miscellany?)
       This exercise has multiple benefits. Boiling down will force you to decide what’s most central to the story and what’s more peripheral. In the course of that you’ll have to go deeper toward what your story’s really about. You’ll probably find elements that you thought mattered but turn out to have been distractions.
       It will also usually reveal things about what you’re doing that you’ve tried not to notice. Like the fact that you have a ton of fascinating material, but you don’t actually know how it’s going to fit together. Or you have a great starting point but only a vague idea where you’re going from there. Or you don’t know who your main character is. Or you’ve been trying to convince yourself that the ending will take care of itself, but really you’re terrified of having to confront it. Or you know this setting or material is compelling to you but you don’t know why. Or you just plain have no idea what you want to say.
       This will expose your weak spots. That’s a good thing. Go right at the scariest stuff. Don’t put off the part that makes you most nervous, expecting it to be easier later. It’s probably the most important thing you need to look at.
       That doesn’t contradict what I was saying about anxiety reduction: it’s about feeling the fear actively as you work through the confusion that keeps stirring up the anxiety. It’s about feeling the bad stuff more intensely as part of the process that leads to dispelling it. (That’s why focused task reduction is better than Xanax. Or even bourbon.)

        The exercise will also give you a document you can use. Once I have my 50-word (or so) description of my story, I keep it with my work and check it whenever I get confused about what I’m saying and why. Like a mission statement. (A couple of former students have told me that they read their summaries every day before starting writing, as a focusing ritual and to keep themselves from getting confused in the first place. I haven’t been doing that, but I probably should.)
       This short summary is that “heart of the story” I was talking about. The germ from which the organism grows. Bring your story down to this and then start building it outward, letting everything unfold from that essential story.
       Write from the inside out.

Clean Boyish Sluggery

A few years ago, my pals Michael Chabon and Diana Schutz were editing a comic book called The Escapist, about the fictional superhero from the former's novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. They both liked my book on the early days of comics, Men of Tomorrow, and asked me to write a mock-historical essay about the original Escapist comics of the '40s, as if such things had really existed. It was a fun challenge, self-parody and parody of someone else's idea at the same time, so I decided I may as well just go into full-on mockery mode and make fun of a bunch of other writers, too. I liked how it came out, as did the Chabon and the Schutz and a smattering of readers.

       I was reminded of it a few days ago, as I was polishing a sequence in The Undressing of America about moral and intellectual attacks on junk culture—risqué stories of the '20s in this case. Rereading the thing, I found myself still liking it, so I thought it would be a good time to pull it out of the back-issue bins. You'll probably like it more if you've read anything about attacks on pop culture in decades past, and even more if you've also read either Michael's book or mine. But even if you haven't read either, I hope it's silly enough to provide a few minutes of...well...escape.


Escaping the Spotlight: The Escapist and the Press
by Gerard Jones
 

From the beginning, superhero comics have elicited reactions from journalists, psychologists, and pedagogues ranging from consternation to bafflement and all the way back to consternation again, providing us with a fascinating glimpse of America’s changing relationship with its heroes. Though much has been written about public reaction to Superman, Wonder Woman, and other icons, no full tally had ever been taken of the greater world’s comments on the Escapist until I researched my recent book, Men of Tomorrow. Regrettably, the lengthy chapter on the Master of Elusion had to be cut from the finished book in order to keep the price point below $27.00 (US) and thereby secure the support of Barnes & Noble’s buyer for Light Nonfiction, Sports and Hobbies. But I am pleased to be able to share some of my most illuminating discoveries here.

       Through what must be only an astonishing coincidence, the first two print mentions of our hero appeared simultaneously in very different publications. In the December 1940 issue of The Fiery Cross, in an article entitled, “New Deceptions to Insnare [sic] Christian Youth,” the Reverend Castigation Lemuel Bixbee noted, “Superman, Captain America, and the Escapist are but a few of the newest baubles dandled at the crossroads of Mongrelization by these Hebrew Deceivers.”  Interestingly, while accurately listing Sam Clay among “those sons of Abraham whose whore-spawn grace these ‘comic magazines,’” the Reverend describes Josef Kavalier as “an obvious Frenchman and therefore no less dedicated to the degradation of the Race.”

       That same month, the holiday edition of Midget Radio Monthly, a trade journal, advised readers to “Take a peep at the Excapist [sic], the latest trick from our own Shelly Anapol of Empire Novelties. Zowie, that ought to sell some midgets!  See you in the funny papers, Shelly!”
       Tom Mayflower would not have long to wait for his first extensive critical analysis.  In “A Stain on American Boyhood,” in the May 25, 1941 Chicago Sun-Times, book reviewer Sterling North (later revered as the author of Rascal) wrote, “Vile as these woodpulp excrescences are with their irrupting boils of lurid ink and mayhem, most ‘comics’ at least celebrate good old American fisticuffs.  We may take some comfort in knowing that the coming generation, bred to savagery though it may be by the likes of Captain Marvel, is at least being encouraged to settle its beefs with clean boyish sluggery. Now comes a new rat to the swarm, a ‘hero’ called the Escapist, to coax our Yankee young down the path of elusion. How will America stand up to the coming horde and hang a fat lip on the face of totalitarianism if our young men are being trained in the virtue of ducking low and slipping out the back like a souse about to be treed by his wife?”

       A year later came a more positive assessment from none other than William Moulton Marston, maverick psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman. “The Escapist,” he told an interviewer for Family Circle magazine, “captures that which is truest and sweetest in our modern children’s literature: the sight of the strong and willful man in tight clothing, regularly bound, trussed, fettered, chained, manacled, leashed, strapped, cuffed and hogtied. Surely no better proof could exist that every healthy young man dreams of nothing more avidly than images of captive submission—a lesson that all publishers would be shrewd to heed!”
       Five months later, folklorist and vibrator developer Gershon Legman, writing in the Freudian journal Neurotica, responded to Marston that the Escapist’s “masochistic constructs would seem rather to reflect the avid dream of Mr. Samuel Clay that the next generation be composed principally of buggerers and inverts like himself.” This appears to be the first public mention of Clay’s sexual preferences, which would earn him much free publicity a decade later thanks to the US Senate.
       But the most astonishing nugget of my literary diggings was this analysis from the great German culture critic Theodor Adorno: “Although promising ontologically an escape by the epistemic subject from the deception of constitutive subjectivity, this Elusion-Master in fact reconstitutes the escape fantasy as a commodity supportive of identitarian thought, so that in the dialectic of ‘Escapist,’ ‘captor’ and ‘victory’ social antagonisms are made both subject and object, and the archvillain is finally not the Mechanist but the category of reflection itself.” (From Wahrheitsgehalt und gesellschaftliche Darstellung als Bestimmte Negation und Selbstbesinnung des Widervernunft im des Überhelden als Kulturindustries Irrvolkshelden, never published in English in its entirety, although a portion appeared in the January, 1947 Readers Digest under the title, “If You Think the Movies Are Bad, You Should Read the Comics!”)
       Astonishing it was, for I, like other comics historians, had always believed that the great Adorno had ignored our beloved medium entirely. According to correspondence found posthumously in the papers of Max Horkheimer, however, Adorno discovered comics while enduring the “Hollywood exile” shared by so many left-wing German intellectuals during the Second World War. Accompanying his colleagues Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg to a pitch meeting with Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox in 1943, he happened upon a dog-eared copy of The Escapist no. 17 on an end table and began leafing through it. Seized by the concept, Brecht and Schoenberg immediately began developing ideas for a Technicolor Escapist musical starring Don Ameche as the hero and Alice Faye as Luna Moth.

       The project might have changed the fortunes of the Champion of Liberation and his creators forever, had not Adorno, famed already for his impromptu intellectual virtuosity, leapt atop a cigarette machine and launched into a critique of superheroes as “fetishizations of contradiction that serve the exploitative needs of late capitalism,” which effectively smothered his friends’ enthusiasm. In the end they pitched Zanuck on a musical adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a vehicle for the ascending Betty Grable. When that project died in the face of objections from Fox’s star musical director, Busby Berkley (“I can’t be sure, D.Z., but I think those little Commies are trying to put something over on us”), Schoenberg lamented in a letter, “Bertie, we should have stuck with the superhero.” Alas that they did not. 
       The best known of all commentators on comics, of course, was the criminal psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Although he neglected to discuss the Escapist in his classic Seduction of the Innocent (reputedly because an intern took the file copies home where they were mistakenly thrown out by his mother), Wertham did once credit the series with playing a vital role in his selection of comics as a field of study. In an article for The Ladies Home Journal in March 1952 entitled, “Why Your Child Will Probably Grow Up to Be a Homicidal Sex Deviant,” the doctor explained, “Once we held a violent boy in solitary confinement in our mental hospital. One night he pried the bars from his windows, escaped the room, and set fire to the premises. I asked myself, ‘Where can he have gotten this idea?’ It was then that I realized that, barely a year before, he had read a magazine entitled The Escapist.  The connection was undeniable.’”

       (Though it cannot be proven, it is likely much more than coincidence that this article was shortly followed by the memo recently unearthed in DC Comics’ archives by Robert Beerbohm, in which Jack Liebowitz enjoined editorial director Irwin Donenfeld that “Batman should never again be shown escaping from a trap,” suggesting “maybe stories about dinosaurs or space aliens instead.”)
       Mentions of the Escapist grew fewer thereafter, as the hero fell from regular publication and faded from popular memory. Readers will of course be familiar with Ken Kesey’s 1960s ruminations on the “Neon Escape”: “Kesey riding high in the shotgun seat with the meth freaks and acid heads unfurling like flags around him, rapping about Tom Mayflower slipping the bonds of the Iron Chain like Ornette Coleman slipping the bonds of tonality or Burroughs the bonds of sense, übermenschen of self-extraction vaulting through the nearest window to find themselves dropping past the edges of reality.” (Tom Wolfe, “Some Notions Are Better Than Others,” Esquire, May 1967.) And who among us has completed a year of college without being required to read literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s psychosexual investigation of Kavalier and Clay’s work, “Come Back to the Raft and Untie Me, Tom Honey”? 
       But in the years to come, even as mentions of him grew more numerous in dittoed, stapled fanzines, to the press at large (with the exception of a single story from the March 17, 1971 Beaver Falls Trumpet & Clarion headlined, “Pow!  Zap!  Biff! Local Lad Sells Old Comic Book for $50!”) the Master of Elusion ceased to exist. And perhaps this is the ending our hero would choose. For being held to the judgments and interpretations of others is surely a form of bondage, and what else should the Lord of Escapism do but slip the snares of the world’s attention?
       (I have heard mentions of a minor novel based on the early lives of Kavalier and Clay published some time in the past five or six years, but as it sounds like little more than an ambitious fan project I haven’t yet put the energy into tracking it down. Any reader with information on this book or its author, however, is welcome to pass it along.)

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Gerard Jones is the author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books), described by one commentator, for a modest fee, as “the definitive history of comics for our time.”