I've been asked to deliver a keynote address at the International Congress on Technology Addiction in Istanbul in a few weeks. I didn't hesitate to accept. I've been to Istanbul twice, and both times wanted to get back as quickly as I could. The last time was over twenty years ago, so this was a very welcome invitation. It was an unexpected invitation, too...because I've never written or spoken publicly on addiction of any kind. But I've been wanting to, wondering if I was ready and what a good entree would be. And suddenly, out of the blue, comes this email from a group I've never heard of asking me to speak.
I'm assuming the reason I was on their list of desirable speakers is that I've written and spoken a fair amount about video games. My topic, though, has always been their content, especially violent fantasy, growing out of that book I wrote called Killing Monsters. I've fielded a few questions about game addiction during the Q&A period of talks and during press interviews, but it's never been my focus. Not my professional focus, I mean. Because privately I've thought a lot about it. Mainly because I struggle with the damned thing myself.
It's not games with me. I don't play video games unless there's some compelling research reason, and I've gotten good at avoiding such reasons. But Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Google News, Blogger...at one time or another I've had to set strict rules and bring in a support network to stay off every damned one of them. Which is part of a larger complex of addictive, obsessive, compulsive, habitual, and God knows what else behaviors I've been wrestling with and exploring and slowly coming to understand for a long time.
I've had a feeling for a while now that I have in me a good book about addiction and recovery. But I haven't known how even to start thinking about it. Now this conference in Istanbul is forcing me to pull at least some of my thoughts and knowledge together and to bring them to other people. I'm expecting it to open the door to more—and I don't mean to more invitations, although that could happen. I mean it'll open some doors in my head.
Something people in spiritual recovery programs talk about are "higher power moments." A lot of people see signs in the events around them from the universe or God or some other guiding power. I've always figured signs were where we wanted to find them. The universe is constantly throwing unexpected twists at us, and if, deep down, we want to read one as pointing us in the right direction, then we'll do that. If we're not inclined to see it as a sign, then we probably won't.
This invitation out of nowhere definitely has "God moment" written all over it. Which is how I choose to take it. I've wanted to open the door to writing and talking publicly about addiction and recovery, but I've been uncertain about how and timid about whether I should. I'm choosing to take this as a sign from the universe that it's time to plunge in. Where it takes me from there, I'll find out when I get there.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Monday, September 2, 2013
Into E-Publishing
So after years of watching this whole “electronic publishing” thing develop and wondering if it might be good for me as a writer, I’m finally plunging in. Will Jacobs and I are hard at work on the “Expanded 30th Anniversary Edition” of our first book, The Beaver Papers.
The publisher is Atomic Drop Press. They’re a very new outfit—they’ve only brought one book out before, a peculiar thing called The Max Kleinman Reader—but they’ve got a snazzy look and a lot of ambition. They’ve gotten themselves onto Amazon and a nearly every other e-book vendor by way of Smashwords, and they’ll be adding print-on-demand soon. And they’ve promised us that after Beaver they’ll want to work with us on more: probably bringing back our comic book The Trouble with Girls and launching at least one new project.
I know I’ve described the conceit of the book before: what if the world’s great writers had written episodes of Leave It to Beaver? With summaries of episodes of the most wholesome of old-style sitcoms as if written by William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Franz Kafka, and twenty other people. We’ll be adding at least ten more scripts to this one, probably more. So far we definitely have Philip Dick, Jim Thompson, Richard Wright, J. G. Ballard, Flannery O’Connor, and the US Office of Civil Defense. That last one is called “Duck and Cleaver.”
It’s been strange and fun to go back to something I did 32 years ago and do more in the same vein. The gulf from one’s early 20s to one’s mid 50s can seem huge, but I've been astonished at how quickly that gulf can be leaped back over. Apparently that goofy, know-nothing, 23-year old is still very much alive in me, for good or ill. Which I’m glad of. He was an idiot in a lot of ways, but he had an energy and optimism and willingness to throw himself into something just because it excited him that I’m glad I haven’t lost. When this job’s done I’ll be curious to see, not only how the new scripts stack up to the old, but how this unexpected loop-back through my past his affected my current work. (Because I’m pretty sure it will, somehow or other.)
It’s also been strange and fun to discover a whole new way of getting books to an audience. Where it will lead me or whether it will make me any money almost doesn't matter now. I’ve been doing the published-on-paper-by-a-big company-in-New-York thing for more than half my life, so I like learning what else the word “book” can mean. If nothing else, this e-publishing thing is fast: Will and I are still writing new material in September, but we still expect to get the book out before 2013 ends and it becomes a 31st Anniversary Edition.
I’ll keep you posted on what I learn.
I know I’ve described the conceit of the book before: what if the world’s great writers had written episodes of Leave It to Beaver? With summaries of episodes of the most wholesome of old-style sitcoms as if written by William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Franz Kafka, and twenty other people. We’ll be adding at least ten more scripts to this one, probably more. So far we definitely have Philip Dick, Jim Thompson, Richard Wright, J. G. Ballard, Flannery O’Connor, and the US Office of Civil Defense. That last one is called “Duck and Cleaver.”It’s been strange and fun to go back to something I did 32 years ago and do more in the same vein. The gulf from one’s early 20s to one’s mid 50s can seem huge, but I've been astonished at how quickly that gulf can be leaped back over. Apparently that goofy, know-nothing, 23-year old is still very much alive in me, for good or ill. Which I’m glad of. He was an idiot in a lot of ways, but he had an energy and optimism and willingness to throw himself into something just because it excited him that I’m glad I haven’t lost. When this job’s done I’ll be curious to see, not only how the new scripts stack up to the old, but how this unexpected loop-back through my past his affected my current work. (Because I’m pretty sure it will, somehow or other.)
It’s also been strange and fun to discover a whole new way of getting books to an audience. Where it will lead me or whether it will make me any money almost doesn't matter now. I’ve been doing the published-on-paper-by-a-big company-in-New-York thing for more than half my life, so I like learning what else the word “book” can mean. If nothing else, this e-publishing thing is fast: Will and I are still writing new material in September, but we still expect to get the book out before 2013 ends and it becomes a 31st Anniversary Edition.
I’ll keep you posted on what I learn.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
The Beaver of Wrath
Today is almost exactly, as well as I can remember, the 30th anniversary of the day my first published book appeared in bookstores.
Will Jacobs and I wrote The Summer of the Beaver in a six-week fever from the end of May to the beginning of July, 1981. He was twenty-six, I was not quite twenty-four. Things change fast when you're young; at the start of those six weeks we were just tossing off parodies to make each other laugh, at the end of it we were revising a book with editors in mind and strategizing how to pitch it to them.
I think we kind of knew that this was the first publishable thing either of us had written, but we weren't about to give up on our vain dreams of selling novels that quickly...and so we ended up birthing a monster of a query letter in which we pitched nine (yes, nine) books at once. A few years ago I read that letter out loud at a Writers Grotto event called Regretature, to the great amusement of people who were not only older and wiser but would have been smart enough not to do anything like that even in their twenties. Here's the video.
We sent off over 100 of those letters, and with them caught the interest of one one agent, Martha Millard, and one editor, Peter Cannon at Crown Publishing. We weren't surprised, deep down, when they both asked to see only the Beaver book.
We were worried that a genuine, professional, New York editor would
insist on messing with our idiosyncratic inventions—like asking us to
substitute better-known authors for personal
fascinations like William Saroyan and Alain Robbe-Grillet—but we had
nothing to fear. Peter was a new editor, no older or wiser than
we were, and he loved the book's peculiarity as much as we did. The 25
parodies and the bizarre historical narrative that holds them together
saw print almost exactly as we'd written them, except that Peter
(wisely) made us ditch the absurd first-person narrator we'd created,
Starchy McGregor, a supposed stunt double for Jerry Mathers. He then made us
cut (to our momentary horror but ultimate agreement) a ton of absurd
narrative from the end of the book, including our synopsis for a
politically-charged movie called Beaver Now. And he suggested a better title: The Beaver Papers: The Story of the Lost Season.
A writer had to wait a long, long time in those pre-computerized days of publishing for his book to come out. We did our revisions through the summer of 1982 and publication was scheduled for a year later. But finally the day came when our beloved publicist, Sally Berk, called to tell us that our book was on the counter of a real bookstore in New York City. From that day on, although nothing quite went the way I'd fantasized it, nothing was quite the same either.
Let's pick up where we left off last time, with the fall-out from the arrival of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Beaver at the Leave It to Beaver production offices...
May 5-10, 1963
Mosher and Connelly were frankly perplexed by this submission. Although horrified at Kerouac's new interpretation of Eddie and Wally's morality, they were nonetheless flattered that such a literary giant would contribute to their show. Having nothing to lose, they presented the script to ABC executives. While they did not recognize Kerouac's name, the executives did seem tentatively interested in this new direction.
Mosher and Connelly then showed the script to the cast. Hugh Beaumont, who brought Ward Cleaver to life on the show, commented, "I like the idea of Wally wanting to be a writer. I did a little writing myself when I was a young man." Stanley Fafara, who played Beaver's little friend Whitey Whitney, praised to the references to Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, whose works he greatly admired.
Mosher and Connelly telegraphed Kerouac, asking if he would care to work with Roland MacLane and Dick Conway on future episodes should ABC reverse its decision to cancel the show. While they waiting for a response, the second submission arrived.
The Gomalco Productions offices were rocked by the arrival in the mail of The Beaver of Wrath by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. In this script, the aging Steinbeck seeks out the essential kinship between the migrants of the depression, whom he eulogized, and the Cleaver family, who epitomize for him the fulfillment of the promise of the Joads.
THE BEAVER OF WRATH
John Steinbeck
The gray soil of Metzger's Field turns to white and the red tanbark of the schoolyard is burned a pale pink by the sun. The people of Mayfield, the people of the land from Camelback Cutoff down to Bell Port, watch Miller's Pond dry into its own mud.
Beaver walks down the road toward home, just released from Saturday school detention for punching Larry Mondello in the stomach. He finds the people of Mayfield streaming out of town in their station wagons. Eddie Haskell wanders by, philosophizing humbly. Beaver says, "Creep! Creep! Creep!" Eddie shakes his head. "Nope, I used to be a creep. But I asked myself, What is it a man can be a creep about? and I knew it was only hisself. I heard you punched a squirt." Beaver says, "Yeah, and I'd do it again if I had to."
They find Ward, in golf sweater, tie, and overalls, squatting in the front yard, drawing patterns in the dust with his newspaper. Wally squats beside him, saying, "Gee, Pa, it's Satiddy afternoon and thar ain't no water in the pond. The fambly ain't got a chancet of a good picnic now." June says, "I seen in the picture books oncet how they's water up to Friend's Lake. I'd like to get me one o' them little picnic tables with trees all around." She spies Beaver and says, "Praise Gawd for vittory! Now I got my whole Cleaver fambly about me again! And if it ain't the old creep!"
Eddie says, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver, but I ain't a creep no more. No man's got business bein' more of a creep than any other." June loads the station wagon with pork bones and baloney sandwiches. Gilbert, Richard, Whitey, Larry, and Violet Rutherford pile on the luggage rack. Wally leads Lumpy to join them. Lumpy says, "Gosh, will there be rabbits we're going, Wally?" "Sure, Lump, you'll have lots of rabbits." "Oh, boy, Wally, and can I eat the rabbits, Wally, huh?"
On the way out of town they meet Gus Chong, the old Chinese fireman and crooked merchant. Wally buys Ward a dog and Beaver beats Wally to a pulp. They find work selling frogs at demeaning wages. In moral outrage, Eddie becomes a creep again and is beaten up by Richard and Gilbert. Beaver is bruised and knows he must go.
June struggles to keep her fambly together, but Beaver says, "Don't be thinkin' about me bein' gone, Ma. Wherever there's kids in trouble, I'll be there. Wherever there's a creep givin' the business to a squirt, Ma, I'll be there." June dries her tears on the dusty sleeve of her old gingham dress.
TAG: At night, Wally is doing his 'lectronics homework at his desk. Beaver is packing peaches into a crate. He says, "Hey, Wally, are there any brothers in the Bible with the initials W and B?" Wally says, "Gosh, Beav, I don't know. I ain't no preacher. I'm just a man o' the land." They collapse exhausted into bed and turn out the meager light, but the room goes on glowing warmly.
Will Jacobs and I wrote The Summer of the Beaver in a six-week fever from the end of May to the beginning of July, 1981. He was twenty-six, I was not quite twenty-four. Things change fast when you're young; at the start of those six weeks we were just tossing off parodies to make each other laugh, at the end of it we were revising a book with editors in mind and strategizing how to pitch it to them.
I think we kind of knew that this was the first publishable thing either of us had written, but we weren't about to give up on our vain dreams of selling novels that quickly...and so we ended up birthing a monster of a query letter in which we pitched nine (yes, nine) books at once. A few years ago I read that letter out loud at a Writers Grotto event called Regretature, to the great amusement of people who were not only older and wiser but would have been smart enough not to do anything like that even in their twenties. Here's the video.
We sent off over 100 of those letters, and with them caught the interest of one one agent, Martha Millard, and one editor, Peter Cannon at Crown Publishing. We weren't surprised, deep down, when they both asked to see only the Beaver book.
We were worried that a genuine, professional, New York editor would
insist on messing with our idiosyncratic inventions—like asking us to
substitute better-known authors for personal
fascinations like William Saroyan and Alain Robbe-Grillet—but we had
nothing to fear. Peter was a new editor, no older or wiser than
we were, and he loved the book's peculiarity as much as we did. The 25
parodies and the bizarre historical narrative that holds them together
saw print almost exactly as we'd written them, except that Peter
(wisely) made us ditch the absurd first-person narrator we'd created,
Starchy McGregor, a supposed stunt double for Jerry Mathers. He then made us
cut (to our momentary horror but ultimate agreement) a ton of absurd
narrative from the end of the book, including our synopsis for a
politically-charged movie called Beaver Now. And he suggested a better title: The Beaver Papers: The Story of the Lost Season.A writer had to wait a long, long time in those pre-computerized days of publishing for his book to come out. We did our revisions through the summer of 1982 and publication was scheduled for a year later. But finally the day came when our beloved publicist, Sally Berk, called to tell us that our book was on the counter of a real bookstore in New York City. From that day on, although nothing quite went the way I'd fantasized it, nothing was quite the same either.
Let's pick up where we left off last time, with the fall-out from the arrival of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Beaver at the Leave It to Beaver production offices...
May 5-10, 1963
Mosher and Connelly were frankly perplexed by this submission. Although horrified at Kerouac's new interpretation of Eddie and Wally's morality, they were nonetheless flattered that such a literary giant would contribute to their show. Having nothing to lose, they presented the script to ABC executives. While they did not recognize Kerouac's name, the executives did seem tentatively interested in this new direction.
Mosher and Connelly telegraphed Kerouac, asking if he would care to work with Roland MacLane and Dick Conway on future episodes should ABC reverse its decision to cancel the show. While they waiting for a response, the second submission arrived.
The Gomalco Productions offices were rocked by the arrival in the mail of The Beaver of Wrath by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. In this script, the aging Steinbeck seeks out the essential kinship between the migrants of the depression, whom he eulogized, and the Cleaver family, who epitomize for him the fulfillment of the promise of the Joads.
John Steinbeck
The gray soil of Metzger's Field turns to white and the red tanbark of the schoolyard is burned a pale pink by the sun. The people of Mayfield, the people of the land from Camelback Cutoff down to Bell Port, watch Miller's Pond dry into its own mud.
Beaver walks down the road toward home, just released from Saturday school detention for punching Larry Mondello in the stomach. He finds the people of Mayfield streaming out of town in their station wagons. Eddie Haskell wanders by, philosophizing humbly. Beaver says, "Creep! Creep! Creep!" Eddie shakes his head. "Nope, I used to be a creep. But I asked myself, What is it a man can be a creep about? and I knew it was only hisself. I heard you punched a squirt." Beaver says, "Yeah, and I'd do it again if I had to."
They find Ward, in golf sweater, tie, and overalls, squatting in the front yard, drawing patterns in the dust with his newspaper. Wally squats beside him, saying, "Gee, Pa, it's Satiddy afternoon and thar ain't no water in the pond. The fambly ain't got a chancet of a good picnic now." June says, "I seen in the picture books oncet how they's water up to Friend's Lake. I'd like to get me one o' them little picnic tables with trees all around." She spies Beaver and says, "Praise Gawd for vittory! Now I got my whole Cleaver fambly about me again! And if it ain't the old creep!"
Eddie says, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver, but I ain't a creep no more. No man's got business bein' more of a creep than any other." June loads the station wagon with pork bones and baloney sandwiches. Gilbert, Richard, Whitey, Larry, and Violet Rutherford pile on the luggage rack. Wally leads Lumpy to join them. Lumpy says, "Gosh, will there be rabbits we're going, Wally?" "Sure, Lump, you'll have lots of rabbits." "Oh, boy, Wally, and can I eat the rabbits, Wally, huh?"
June struggles to keep her fambly together, but Beaver says, "Don't be thinkin' about me bein' gone, Ma. Wherever there's kids in trouble, I'll be there. Wherever there's a creep givin' the business to a squirt, Ma, I'll be there." June dries her tears on the dusty sleeve of her old gingham dress.
TAG: At night, Wally is doing his 'lectronics homework at his desk. Beaver is packing peaches into a crate. He says, "Hey, Wally, are there any brothers in the Bible with the initials W and B?" Wally says, "Gosh, Beav, I don't know. I ain't no preacher. I'm just a man o' the land." They collapse exhausted into bed and turn out the meager light, but the room goes on glowing warmly.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Dharma Beaver
Thirty years ago this month, my first book was published... and in the process served up one of the more amusing ironies of my life.
Before we wrote The Beaver Papers, Will Jacobs and I had worked constantly, furiously, and obsessively to become published novelists. Nothing else had mattered to either of us since our teens except "becoming a writer," and to us, like most young lit-heads, that meant novels. I'd dropped out of college to write novels; Will had refused to go in the first place. We met at a used bookstore, where we'd both taken jobs in order not to have to think about anything but books. We'd each written a few of the things, every one of them completely dismissed by every agent and editor we sent them to. Then we wrote one together—in multiple Faulknerian first person voices—which garnered no greater worldly success than the comment by our boss at the bookstore that "it's actually not as bad as I thought it would be." Ultimately we even compromised our literary purity just so we could jam a foot into the doorway of publishing: Will wrote a hard-boiled mystery and I wrote a kids' book. Those didn't work any better than the Faulkner homage had.
During those years of frustration, we would blow off steam by writing nonsense to make each other laugh. We discovered that parody enabled us both to try on the clothes of the writers we loved and to make fun of the crap that we saw other (luckier, less deserving) writers getting away with. We wrote intentionally bad poetry and mock scholarly reviews. And we wrote summaries of episodes of Leave It to Beaver as if they'd been written by all our favorite authors. None of it intended for anyone's eyes but our own...and sometimes those of a long-suffering roommate.
But when those roommates—Jim Zook for me, Chip Kabrich for Will—started laughing out loud at our Beaver parodies, we experienced, for the first time in our lives, what it was like to write for an audience that actually wanted to hear us. It was a heady feeling, enough to make us write twenty-five of those parodies and read them to anyone who would sit still. At some point, I don't remember when or how, we realized that we might be able to get a book out of them, and maybe even sell it to a publisher...and if we could get any book into print, even this silly thing, then surely that would open the door to getting our novels published!
We were almost right about that. Every sale we've made since then—humor articles, comic books, nonfiction books, screenplays—has happened, directly or indirectly, because of this book that we knocked off to distract ourselves from the frustration of not being able to sell any of the books that we were determined to build our careers on. But one thing still hasn't happened: after thirty years, neither of us has gotten a novel published. God, as they say, has a good sense of humor.
Now, on to the second excerpt and the first parody...
May 5, 1963
Jack Kerouac, leading voice of the Beat Generation, often wrote about the search for America. Here, on the heels of his Big Sur, he brings to light the search theme that was always latent in Leave It to Beaver.
DHARMA BEAVER
Jack Kerouac
Eddie steals a bike and passes Mary Ellen Rogers' house on the way to Wally's. Mary Ellen, on the porch with her friend Elma, nudges her and says, "There goes Eddie Haskell. I wonder where he's going to?" Elma looks mystified and says, "I wonder where he's coming from?"
At Wally's, Eddie says, "Hey, Sam, what state are we in?" Wally, at his desk in his bedroom, typing on a huge roll of paper, says, "Aw, go on, Eddie. I don't have time to think about things like that. I'm writing a novel." Eddie says, "Oh, yeah? Do you have time to notice that?" He points to the bike out the window. "Gee, where'd you get the new wheels?" asks Wally. Beaver, reading A Coney Island of the Mind, says, "Aw, he probably swiped it." Eddie says, "Shut up, squirt. You don't know the meaning of Beat."
Beaver asks, "Hey, Wally, what direction is San Francisco from here?" Wally looks mystified: "Gee, I dunno, Beav. In geography class they told us it was on the West Coast, but...." Eddie says, "Come on, Gertrude, don't be such a square. Why do you think I swiped the wheels? These old-timers don't know any more about where we are than we do. We've got to found out for ourselves." "Gosh, I don't know, Eddie," says Wally. But Eddie insists and Wally agrees. Eddie says, "All we've got to do is make tracks until we get to some city we've heard of. Then we'll know what state we're in."
On the way out of Mayfield they pass the Rutherfords', where Lumpy is sitting in a Lotus position on the front lawn. When the boys ask him what he's doing, Lumpy responds, "I'm getting ready for my trip to Japan." Wally says, "Gee, you mean your dad's letting you go? What are you gonna do there?" Lumpy says, "I'm gonna be a Buddhist monk and write poetry." "A Buddhist monk, Sam?" says Eddie. "Those old Chinamen won't let you eat!" Lumpy says, "Really? Gosh, Daddy didn't tell me that." Wally asks, "By the way, Lumpy, what direction is Japan from here?"
They pass a road sign reading, BELL PORT, 5 MILES. Wally says, "Gee, Eddie, it's like we're in search of America." Eddie says, "To hell with that, Sam. I just want to know where in America we are."
They arrive in Bell Port, buy a bottle of whiskey, drink themselves blind, and recite Ginsberg's Howl in chorus. They accost strangers and ask where they are. Unanimously, the strangers answer, "In Bell Port." They ask, "But where's Bell Port?" The strangers look at them, mystified, and walk away.
They awake among empty bottles in a sleazy hotel. Suddenly Ward enters to take them home. At home, in the den, Ward says, "When I was your age, Wally, I went looking for America too. But then I realized that this was America, right here in Mayfield." Wally says, "Sure, Dad. But what part of America?" Ward looks mystified.
TAG: Beaver bursts into the boys' bedroom waving an envelope. "Hey, Wally! Hey, Wally! Look, you got a letter from Viking Press." Wally opens the envelope and says, "Holy cow, Beav. They're publishing my novel." Beaver teases him good-naturedly in his screeching falsetto: "Bookworm! Bookworm!" Wally good-naturedly hits him with a pillow.
Next week: John Steinbeck's The Beaver of Wrath.
Before we wrote The Beaver Papers, Will Jacobs and I had worked constantly, furiously, and obsessively to become published novelists. Nothing else had mattered to either of us since our teens except "becoming a writer," and to us, like most young lit-heads, that meant novels. I'd dropped out of college to write novels; Will had refused to go in the first place. We met at a used bookstore, where we'd both taken jobs in order not to have to think about anything but books. We'd each written a few of the things, every one of them completely dismissed by every agent and editor we sent them to. Then we wrote one together—in multiple Faulknerian first person voices—which garnered no greater worldly success than the comment by our boss at the bookstore that "it's actually not as bad as I thought it would be." Ultimately we even compromised our literary purity just so we could jam a foot into the doorway of publishing: Will wrote a hard-boiled mystery and I wrote a kids' book. Those didn't work any better than the Faulkner homage had.
During those years of frustration, we would blow off steam by writing nonsense to make each other laugh. We discovered that parody enabled us both to try on the clothes of the writers we loved and to make fun of the crap that we saw other (luckier, less deserving) writers getting away with. We wrote intentionally bad poetry and mock scholarly reviews. And we wrote summaries of episodes of Leave It to Beaver as if they'd been written by all our favorite authors. None of it intended for anyone's eyes but our own...and sometimes those of a long-suffering roommate.
But when those roommates—Jim Zook for me, Chip Kabrich for Will—started laughing out loud at our Beaver parodies, we experienced, for the first time in our lives, what it was like to write for an audience that actually wanted to hear us. It was a heady feeling, enough to make us write twenty-five of those parodies and read them to anyone who would sit still. At some point, I don't remember when or how, we realized that we might be able to get a book out of them, and maybe even sell it to a publisher...and if we could get any book into print, even this silly thing, then surely that would open the door to getting our novels published!
We were almost right about that. Every sale we've made since then—humor articles, comic books, nonfiction books, screenplays—has happened, directly or indirectly, because of this book that we knocked off to distract ourselves from the frustration of not being able to sell any of the books that we were determined to build our careers on. But one thing still hasn't happened: after thirty years, neither of us has gotten a novel published. God, as they say, has a good sense of humor.
Now, on to the second excerpt and the first parody...
May 5, 1963
Jack Kerouac, leading voice of the Beat Generation, often wrote about the search for America. Here, on the heels of his Big Sur, he brings to light the search theme that was always latent in Leave It to Beaver.
Jack Kerouac
Eddie steals a bike and passes Mary Ellen Rogers' house on the way to Wally's. Mary Ellen, on the porch with her friend Elma, nudges her and says, "There goes Eddie Haskell. I wonder where he's going to?" Elma looks mystified and says, "I wonder where he's coming from?"
At Wally's, Eddie says, "Hey, Sam, what state are we in?" Wally, at his desk in his bedroom, typing on a huge roll of paper, says, "Aw, go on, Eddie. I don't have time to think about things like that. I'm writing a novel." Eddie says, "Oh, yeah? Do you have time to notice that?" He points to the bike out the window. "Gee, where'd you get the new wheels?" asks Wally. Beaver, reading A Coney Island of the Mind, says, "Aw, he probably swiped it." Eddie says, "Shut up, squirt. You don't know the meaning of Beat."
Beaver asks, "Hey, Wally, what direction is San Francisco from here?" Wally looks mystified: "Gee, I dunno, Beav. In geography class they told us it was on the West Coast, but...." Eddie says, "Come on, Gertrude, don't be such a square. Why do you think I swiped the wheels? These old-timers don't know any more about where we are than we do. We've got to found out for ourselves." "Gosh, I don't know, Eddie," says Wally. But Eddie insists and Wally agrees. Eddie says, "All we've got to do is make tracks until we get to some city we've heard of. Then we'll know what state we're in."
They pass a road sign reading, BELL PORT, 5 MILES. Wally says, "Gee, Eddie, it's like we're in search of America." Eddie says, "To hell with that, Sam. I just want to know where in America we are."
They arrive in Bell Port, buy a bottle of whiskey, drink themselves blind, and recite Ginsberg's Howl in chorus. They accost strangers and ask where they are. Unanimously, the strangers answer, "In Bell Port." They ask, "But where's Bell Port?" The strangers look at them, mystified, and walk away.
They awake among empty bottles in a sleazy hotel. Suddenly Ward enters to take them home. At home, in the den, Ward says, "When I was your age, Wally, I went looking for America too. But then I realized that this was America, right here in Mayfield." Wally says, "Sure, Dad. But what part of America?" Ward looks mystified.
TAG: Beaver bursts into the boys' bedroom waving an envelope. "Hey, Wally! Hey, Wally! Look, you got a letter from Viking Press." Wally opens the envelope and says, "Holy cow, Beav. They're publishing my novel." Beaver teases him good-naturedly in his screeching falsetto: "Bookworm! Bookworm!" Wally good-naturedly hits him with a pillow.
Next week: John Steinbeck's The Beaver of Wrath.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Thirty Years
It hit me recently, with a mixture of pride, nostalgia, and horror, that I was up against the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book. It was August, 1983, that The Beaver Papers, written with my friend Will Jacobs, first hit the bookstores and launched the long, strange trip of my career.
That's a long time, thirty years. A lot can happen in that much time. In that much time, nations can fall and new industries can be born, careers can begin and end, babies can grow up and have babies of their own. In that much time, a bright-eyed, nervous, inexhaustible, naive 26-year-old who thinks his life will be perfect if he can only get a book published can turn into a tired, slightly cantankerous 56-year-old who sometimes wonders why the hell he ever wanted to write books in the first place. (Not saying that did happen. But it could have.)
This is how long ago it was: Will and I wrote it with pens on paper, then revised it on a typewriter, fixing our mistakes with Liquid Paper. We could only work together when we could physically meet or when we were each at our homes, so that we could talk on the telephones plugged into our walls. When it was done we went to the library and collected agents' addresses from a book called Literary Marketplace, then we had copies of a cover letter run off at Kinko's, folded them and put them in envelopes, licked stamps and stuck them on the outside, and carried them to a mailbox. Then we waited, knowing it would take days to get even the quickest responses. It's amazing that anything got published at all in those days.
Also how long ago it was: Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom that we had both been fascinated with since childhood, off the air for twenty years and already feeling like an echo of a distant era, was being shown every afternoon on broadcast television. (Now it's been off for fifty years, a number I can hardly make sense of, and although it hasn't been entirely forgotten, it's not the icon it was; at that time, though, everyone knew it and got what it represented.) Somehow or other, Will and I started watching it together, making fun of it but also yearning a bit for that lost world—which was the lost world of pre-Vietnam America but also the lost world of wholesome TV and the lost world of our own suburban childhoods, before we became city boys and drove ourselves into anxious madness with dreams of being professional writers.
Then one of us, we don't remember who, made a joke about what if some unwholesome, un-TV writer of the time—very possibly Jack Kerouac—had written about the Cleaver family.
To honor this anniversary of mine, I've decided to post an except from the book every few weeks from now through August. I'm sure I'll also try to dust off some memories of how it all happened. I'll have to resist the temptation to rewrite as I go—that young me and young Will could turn out an infinite variety of clunky sentences and bad transitions, but I have to admit that they were able to do things we could never do now. Even as I cringe at my old lack of polish, I can't help admiring my old energy, impulsiveness, and cock-surety.
Let's start with the original, preposterous introduction...
On May 3, 1963, the news filtered down from ABC to Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly that "Leave It to Beaver" would probably be canceled. Just a month before, network executives had told Mosher and Connelly, producers and head writers of the show, that if new blood could be put into "Beaver," the series might be saved. But after weeks of frustrating meetings with regular writers Dick Conway and Roland MacLane and multi-talented director-star Hugh Beaumont, it was conceded that no new ideas could be contrived.
Mosher suggested an episode in which brother Wally gets drunk on near-beer, but Connelly vetoed it as being too outlandish. Connelly suggested an episode in which June appeared in a pair of slacks, but Beaumont considered it lewd. Beaumont suggested an episode in which Beaver actually metamorphosed into a rodent, but Mosher and Connelly denounced it as derivative.
MacLane and Conway completed a script in which Beaver gets a flat tire on his bike and conceals it from his parents, but network executives, although impressed with its daring, decided that it didn't quite fit their standards for new blood.
By May 5 the staff had cleared their desks and prepared to go to pasture when, with the afternoon mail delivery, the first submission arrived.
Clearly the news of Beaver's impending cancellation had leaked out quickly, evidently reaching as far as Lowell, Massachusetts, for Jack Kerouac was the first to rise in support of Beaver. His script, Dharma Beaver, was the first drop in a deluge of literary brilliance to flood the network offices. From Montmartre and Tokyo they flowed in; from North Beach and Greenwich Village, from Majorca and Fresno; and from as far away as Moscow and Nigeria. The cry rang like a trumpet blast through the artistic community of the globe: "The Beaver is endangered! Save the Beaver!" Even the petition to free Jean Genêt from prison did not inspire such solidarity among the literati of the world. Before the summer was through, mankind would witness a flowering of the arts since it had not seen since the Italian Renaissance.
Now, after years of diligent research into old studio files, we have pieced together the story of the "Lost Season." We present here the events of that summer, along with summaries of the twenty-five unproduced scripts that were slated for the 1963-1964 season of "Leave It to Beaver." Although dozens of other scripts were submitted, we include only those that meet the highest literary standards.
We have endeavored to preserve the writing styles and dialogue of the scripts wherever possible. The fruits of the "Lost Season" have been harvested at last.
I'll post the first fruit, Dharma Beaver, next time.
That's a long time, thirty years. A lot can happen in that much time. In that much time, nations can fall and new industries can be born, careers can begin and end, babies can grow up and have babies of their own. In that much time, a bright-eyed, nervous, inexhaustible, naive 26-year-old who thinks his life will be perfect if he can only get a book published can turn into a tired, slightly cantankerous 56-year-old who sometimes wonders why the hell he ever wanted to write books in the first place. (Not saying that did happen. But it could have.)
This is how long ago it was: Will and I wrote it with pens on paper, then revised it on a typewriter, fixing our mistakes with Liquid Paper. We could only work together when we could physically meet or when we were each at our homes, so that we could talk on the telephones plugged into our walls. When it was done we went to the library and collected agents' addresses from a book called Literary Marketplace, then we had copies of a cover letter run off at Kinko's, folded them and put them in envelopes, licked stamps and stuck them on the outside, and carried them to a mailbox. Then we waited, knowing it would take days to get even the quickest responses. It's amazing that anything got published at all in those days. Also how long ago it was: Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom that we had both been fascinated with since childhood, off the air for twenty years and already feeling like an echo of a distant era, was being shown every afternoon on broadcast television. (Now it's been off for fifty years, a number I can hardly make sense of, and although it hasn't been entirely forgotten, it's not the icon it was; at that time, though, everyone knew it and got what it represented.) Somehow or other, Will and I started watching it together, making fun of it but also yearning a bit for that lost world—which was the lost world of pre-Vietnam America but also the lost world of wholesome TV and the lost world of our own suburban childhoods, before we became city boys and drove ourselves into anxious madness with dreams of being professional writers.
Then one of us, we don't remember who, made a joke about what if some unwholesome, un-TV writer of the time—very possibly Jack Kerouac—had written about the Cleaver family.
To honor this anniversary of mine, I've decided to post an except from the book every few weeks from now through August. I'm sure I'll also try to dust off some memories of how it all happened. I'll have to resist the temptation to rewrite as I go—that young me and young Will could turn out an infinite variety of clunky sentences and bad transitions, but I have to admit that they were able to do things we could never do now. Even as I cringe at my old lack of polish, I can't help admiring my old energy, impulsiveness, and cock-surety.
Let's start with the original, preposterous introduction...
On May 3, 1963, the news filtered down from ABC to Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly that "Leave It to Beaver" would probably be canceled. Just a month before, network executives had told Mosher and Connelly, producers and head writers of the show, that if new blood could be put into "Beaver," the series might be saved. But after weeks of frustrating meetings with regular writers Dick Conway and Roland MacLane and multi-talented director-star Hugh Beaumont, it was conceded that no new ideas could be contrived.
Mosher suggested an episode in which brother Wally gets drunk on near-beer, but Connelly vetoed it as being too outlandish. Connelly suggested an episode in which June appeared in a pair of slacks, but Beaumont considered it lewd. Beaumont suggested an episode in which Beaver actually metamorphosed into a rodent, but Mosher and Connelly denounced it as derivative.By May 5 the staff had cleared their desks and prepared to go to pasture when, with the afternoon mail delivery, the first submission arrived.
Clearly the news of Beaver's impending cancellation had leaked out quickly, evidently reaching as far as Lowell, Massachusetts, for Jack Kerouac was the first to rise in support of Beaver. His script, Dharma Beaver, was the first drop in a deluge of literary brilliance to flood the network offices. From Montmartre and Tokyo they flowed in; from North Beach and Greenwich Village, from Majorca and Fresno; and from as far away as Moscow and Nigeria. The cry rang like a trumpet blast through the artistic community of the globe: "The Beaver is endangered! Save the Beaver!" Even the petition to free Jean Genêt from prison did not inspire such solidarity among the literati of the world. Before the summer was through, mankind would witness a flowering of the arts since it had not seen since the Italian Renaissance.
Now, after years of diligent research into old studio files, we have pieced together the story of the "Lost Season." We present here the events of that summer, along with summaries of the twenty-five unproduced scripts that were slated for the 1963-1964 season of "Leave It to Beaver." Although dozens of other scripts were submitted, we include only those that meet the highest literary standards.
We have endeavored to preserve the writing styles and dialogue of the scripts wherever possible. The fruits of the "Lost Season" have been harvested at last.
I'll post the first fruit, Dharma Beaver, next time.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
They had faces then. Scary, creepy faces.
Every July I've been blogging about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the reliable highlights of my year. This year they've given us a lagniappe in the form of an additional three-day festival in June, this one a celebration of Alfred Hitchcock.
Yes, Hitch was young once, not very fat and with a full head of hair. He was also, at the age of 24, directing movies for Gainsborough Pictures. At the age of 27, after the release of The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog, he was pretty generally recognized as Britain's most brilliant director. He made ten movies in the 1920s, before recorded sound took over. Fortunately for us, nine have survived, a remarkable number given that the vast majority of silent movies are gone forever. Starting Friday the 14th, all nine of them will be showing at the splendid, battered, indestructible Castro Theater.
I've seen only two of the movies previously—or really one and a half, because the version of Blackmail I saw was the talkie, with muffled dialogue sequences jammed in during production (and I have faith that it will be even better with the gorgeous Mont Alto Orchestra accompanying it in its original conception). Both were dazzling and clever and chilling. If the other seven are only half as good as those, they will be fun and rewarding. And if they're not even that good, I know there will be at least those few moments of Hitchcockian ingenuity to make it all worthwhile.
These movies were quickly made, a few a year, and without Hollywood budgets (which even then were vast in comparison to London budgets). There will be no dangling off the face of Mt. Rushmore or assaults by crop dusters or murderous flocks of birds. Which is a good thing, if you ask me. In this tighter, more intimate frame, he had to exercise his genius for finding the single, riveting, unnerving image. With the dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, quality of silent films, he could bring out that most visceral disquiet stirred by the human face. As I found when I pulled a few images from the movies in the festival:
So there will be great images, clever plots, beautiful music, the old magic of the Castro, and that fiercely enthusiastic crowd the festival always brings out. There will also be the presence of the British Film Institute, who saved and restored these movies, raising lots of pleasant memories for me of warm, breezy summer evenings on the South Bank of the Thames. It'll be a good weekend. And then just a month later comes the regular Silent Film Festival. Life is abundant.
These movies were quickly made, a few a year, and without Hollywood budgets (which even then were vast in comparison to London budgets). There will be no dangling off the face of Mt. Rushmore or assaults by crop dusters or murderous flocks of birds. Which is a good thing, if you ask me. In this tighter, more intimate frame, he had to exercise his genius for finding the single, riveting, unnerving image. With the dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, quality of silent films, he could bring out that most visceral disquiet stirred by the human face. As I found when I pulled a few images from the movies in the festival:
So there will be great images, clever plots, beautiful music, the old magic of the Castro, and that fiercely enthusiastic crowd the festival always brings out. There will also be the presence of the British Film Institute, who saved and restored these movies, raising lots of pleasant memories for me of warm, breezy summer evenings on the South Bank of the Thames. It'll be a good weekend. And then just a month later comes the regular Silent Film Festival. Life is abundant.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Elements of Story
Last time, I posted the basic idea of the Finding Your Story workshop I teach at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, including my thoughts on what I call “the heart of the story.” A couple of past participants suggested I share some of the other story-writing principles I talk about, so here we go...
Of course, there’s more to a story than just its heart. That’s something we’ll discuss further as the weeks go on, but in the meantime it’s worth kicking around some general thoughts on how most good stories work.
I like to think of stories being woven of three parallel lines, each shaping the others at every point (and thanks to Jennine Lanouette of Screentakes for getting me started thinking about this):
1. The physical plot. This is the stuff that happens: what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way, how things are changed by the end. Confusions and clarifications, breakups and marriages, deaths and mysteries, wars and quests. Call it the character’s relationship with the world.
2. The character story. This is what happens to your protagonist inside, the emotional, moral, intellectual, and spiritual changes that are happening while the physical plot is unfolding. Call this the character’s relationship with himself.
3. The theme. This is what the story means, what you, the writer, is telling us about people or life or yourself. This is the character’s relationship with the big questions of life.
By “theme” I don’t necessarily mean any sort of inspiring statement about the meaning of it all. It can be pretty simple, and it can be pretty uninspiring. The theme of Camus’s The Stranger is, more or less, that nothing matters. There’s a great deal of serious fiction out there, especially by Americans in the last few decades, basically saying that families are screwed up but we survive somehow; or that families are so screwed up that a lot of us don’t survive. The theme of an awful lot of Hollywood movies is just that romantic love is really, really, really important. The broadest farces of stage and screen are usually just telling us that life is absurd and not very meaningful, but it’s kind of fun if you don’t worry about much.
Even if your theme modest, though, it’s important not to ignore it or run from it in fear or dismiss it as pretentious. Because if your plot holds together at all, then I can promise you that it’s saying something about your view of the world or people or yourself. And it’ll work better if you’re conscious of that instead of blundering into it by accident.
In The Maltese Falcon, the shenanigans involving the pursuit of the black bird (the physical plot) occupy most of the screen time and generate most of the specific scenes. They’re fun and provide a lot of great moments, but they’re also confusing and ultimately not even that important to understand. The emotional and moral story of Sam Spade himself, though, is powerful: a compromised man, sleeping with both his partner’s wife and the woman who turns out to have murdered said partner, comes to realize that there’s still a code of conduct in this dirty world, that “when a man’s partner is murdered he’s supposed to do something about it.”
Spade’s realization takes the form of action when he turns his lover over to the police. That action brings together the most important threads of the physical plot and completes his character story. It’s also what reveals the meaning of the whole thing, what we in the audience are left with both morally and emotionally.
And just as a great story’s theme can be a modest and quiet one, a character’s evolution doesn’t have to be big either. Sam Spade is pretty much the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning, except for that one small, but profound, realization.
These three threads interweave and shape each other through mutual cause and effect. A significant plot event will usually force some change to the character’s inner state (emotional, moral, intellectual relationship with himself). Or a change in the character’s inner state causes him to do something that creates a significant event, which then turns the plot. But then, the turning of the plot probably causes the character to change further; which may then lead her to do something else to turn the plot again.
Of course, some big event can come from outside that changes the plot and the character’s development simultaneously; but even then, the change in the character will probably change her response to the big plot event, which turns the plot, which makes her change more. In other words, each piece of both the physical plot and the character story is at once cause and effect: the cause of the next effect, which becomes the cause of something else.
It’s the way in which that interplay of cause and effect brings the two threads of plot and character together that states your theme. In one sense, you deliver your theme by showing us which causes have the most significant or lasting effects. The final effect in the chain is the one we take away with us.
In addition to the interweaving-thread metaphor, I also like to picture a story as a pyramid or a triangle: the base, the beginning, is broad, in that all sorts of factors are at play and countless possibilities can come true; some of the elements seem very far from the others. As you build toward the apex, the climax, the lines draw closer together, everything happens in an increasingly confined arena, options are eliminated. The essential elements all come together in a point at the end.
For that matter, the river metaphor covers both: little creeks and streams come in from all directions, combining and joining, sometimes pooling into lakes, but ultimately disappearing into the one big river before it reaches the sea.
***
At its simplest level, we could describe a story as just “what someone does and what happens as a result.”
Most stories are essentially: “A character wants something. When she tries to get it, things happen that get in her way or enable her, and finally she either gets it or not.”
A common wrinkle to that, which most psychologically significant and emotionally moving stories have in some form: the protagonist knows what she wants, but what she doesn’t know is that she really needs something else.
That can be tragic: he wants to dismiss the Sphinx’s prophecy and live the life he desires, telling Fate to go screw herself and living by his own will, right down to killing the king of Thebes and marrying his widow. But what he really needs is to learn to respect this Fate. Because she’s always going to win.
The same principle can be happy, too: what he wants is to pack a steamer trunk and sail to the South Seas, but what he needs is to realize how important he is to the life of his community and how much more meaningful that is than indulging his personal fantasies. (And every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.)
The want is the character’s motivation, usually what gets the events rolling, but the heart of the story is more often really about his or her need.
Usually a happy ending comes because a character figures out what he needs instead of what he wants just in time to change events and attain what he needs. In the best tragic endings the character figures out the same thing—but just too late to change events and get what he needs.
George Bailey doesn’t drown himself, so he gets a chance to learn the truth of his life and go home for Christmas. Oedipus learns his lesson too. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get it through his thick skull until the city’s falling apart, his mother’s dead, and his reputation is pretty thoroughly shot. But at their hearts, they’re the same essential story of individual will fighting and losing to a greater purpose.
Most strong stories (but not all) turn on people making decisions. They make choices early on that propel the story inevitably into its heart; then they make choices later that propel the story toward its conclusion. If the character evolves in the course of the story, then the later decisions will flow from the character’s “new self” just as organically as the early ones flowed from her “old self.”
Although your characters will make lots of decisions along the way, it’s helpful to turn the biggest events on two main decisions:
1. The one that kicks the story into gear in the first place (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “old self”).
2. The one that brings it all to completion (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “new self”).
You can think about the whole story as nothing but the process of that character changing from the person who made the first decision to the one who makes the second.
In Thelma and Louise, Thelma is given a hard decision at the start: stay home to please the husband she’s afraid of or go on a joy ride with Louise and risk his anger. Her decision is what makes the whole movie happen. Later in the story, Louise is wavering and confused, so Thelma has to make another decision: surrender to the mercy of the male world, or keep running and take control of their own destinies, even if that’s looking pretty hopeless.
In a sense she’s making the same decision both times: escape male power by taking off with Louise. But the difference in the two versions of Thelma who make those decisions—in the first following Louise’s stronger will, in the second taking over the decision-making for both of them—shows how she has changed. (Oh, and thanks to Jennine Lanouette here too!)
One could also argue that her second big decision is the final one: going over the cliff. Which is also a sort of follow-up to the original decision, but with a great deal more weight on it. On the other hand, one could say that that final decision was just the playing out of her earlier decision to keep running instead of surrendering. These analyses are all pretty flexible. The important thing is how they might help you see your own characters’ decisions—and therefore your own authorial decisions—more clearly.
Your protagonist’s decisions both force and reveal her development, and therefore they also carry your theme. Which means that if someone’s making crucial decisions in your story, then that someone should probably be your protagonist.
In fact, that can reveal who your protagonist is; because the question, “Who is this story really about?” is sometimes not as easily answered as you might think. In the beginning of Thelma and Louise, Thelma is the passive one swept up in a plot initiated by Louise, who suggests the road trip, shoots the guy, and then decides to run for Mexico instead of trusting the American justice system. But during all that, Thelma develops a stronger sense of self, and from about the middle of the story she drives the plot: she’s the one who commits the robbery and assaults the cop and so backs them into their fatal predicament, and she’s the one who wants to “keep going” in the final shot.
You could say it’s a story with two protagonists, but I find it more useful to think of the protagonist being Thelma: it’s the story of one woman’s journey from fear and passivity to courage and action.
Which brings us back to endings, because the ending of Thelma and Louise has everything to do with what it’s about. Had they gotten away, it would have been a story about how inner strength can conquer anything (Hollywood’s favorite theme for the past thirty years). But since they go over the cliff, it’s about how inner strength matters more than anything, even if you’re in a cruel universe that doesn’t give you any chance of conquering anything.
That’s why I suggest another exercise as you flesh out your story: try starting at the end and plotting backward.
Which really means: hold a general ending in mind without committing to much that comes before. Then ask yourself what events need to happen, and what elements you need in place, in order to set up that ending; then look at what you need to set up those events. Keep working backward. Build the pyramid down from its point. Break the river into streams and send them up the mountains. Reverse engineer the story.
Doing that will make even clearer what your creative decisions will have to be. It’ll reveal weak spots, too, places where you’ve let one event lead to another that doesn’t really move you toward your ending or throws your timing off. And remember, that’s a good thing, discovering your weak spots. It only feels bad for a little while. Then you fix it.
***
“Action is character,” Fitzgerald said. Which is true. But character is also action. And action is also theme, and theme is character, and all together they’re just story. Ultimately it’s all one. In this workshop, it’s that one thing, that singularity, that “what am I saying here,” that we’re digging to find. The rest will follow.
Of course, there’s more to a story than just its heart. That’s something we’ll discuss further as the weeks go on, but in the meantime it’s worth kicking around some general thoughts on how most good stories work.
I like to think of stories being woven of three parallel lines, each shaping the others at every point (and thanks to Jennine Lanouette of Screentakes for getting me started thinking about this):
1. The physical plot. This is the stuff that happens: what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way, how things are changed by the end. Confusions and clarifications, breakups and marriages, deaths and mysteries, wars and quests. Call it the character’s relationship with the world.
2. The character story. This is what happens to your protagonist inside, the emotional, moral, intellectual, and spiritual changes that are happening while the physical plot is unfolding. Call this the character’s relationship with himself.
3. The theme. This is what the story means, what you, the writer, is telling us about people or life or yourself. This is the character’s relationship with the big questions of life.
By “theme” I don’t necessarily mean any sort of inspiring statement about the meaning of it all. It can be pretty simple, and it can be pretty uninspiring. The theme of Camus’s The Stranger is, more or less, that nothing matters. There’s a great deal of serious fiction out there, especially by Americans in the last few decades, basically saying that families are screwed up but we survive somehow; or that families are so screwed up that a lot of us don’t survive. The theme of an awful lot of Hollywood movies is just that romantic love is really, really, really important. The broadest farces of stage and screen are usually just telling us that life is absurd and not very meaningful, but it’s kind of fun if you don’t worry about much.
Even if your theme modest, though, it’s important not to ignore it or run from it in fear or dismiss it as pretentious. Because if your plot holds together at all, then I can promise you that it’s saying something about your view of the world or people or yourself. And it’ll work better if you’re conscious of that instead of blundering into it by accident.
Spade’s realization takes the form of action when he turns his lover over to the police. That action brings together the most important threads of the physical plot and completes his character story. It’s also what reveals the meaning of the whole thing, what we in the audience are left with both morally and emotionally.
And just as a great story’s theme can be a modest and quiet one, a character’s evolution doesn’t have to be big either. Sam Spade is pretty much the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning, except for that one small, but profound, realization.
These three threads interweave and shape each other through mutual cause and effect. A significant plot event will usually force some change to the character’s inner state (emotional, moral, intellectual relationship with himself). Or a change in the character’s inner state causes him to do something that creates a significant event, which then turns the plot. But then, the turning of the plot probably causes the character to change further; which may then lead her to do something else to turn the plot again.
Of course, some big event can come from outside that changes the plot and the character’s development simultaneously; but even then, the change in the character will probably change her response to the big plot event, which turns the plot, which makes her change more. In other words, each piece of both the physical plot and the character story is at once cause and effect: the cause of the next effect, which becomes the cause of something else.
It’s the way in which that interplay of cause and effect brings the two threads of plot and character together that states your theme. In one sense, you deliver your theme by showing us which causes have the most significant or lasting effects. The final effect in the chain is the one we take away with us.
In addition to the interweaving-thread metaphor, I also like to picture a story as a pyramid or a triangle: the base, the beginning, is broad, in that all sorts of factors are at play and countless possibilities can come true; some of the elements seem very far from the others. As you build toward the apex, the climax, the lines draw closer together, everything happens in an increasingly confined arena, options are eliminated. The essential elements all come together in a point at the end.
For that matter, the river metaphor covers both: little creeks and streams come in from all directions, combining and joining, sometimes pooling into lakes, but ultimately disappearing into the one big river before it reaches the sea.
***
At its simplest level, we could describe a story as just “what someone does and what happens as a result.”
Most stories are essentially: “A character wants something. When she tries to get it, things happen that get in her way or enable her, and finally she either gets it or not.”
A common wrinkle to that, which most psychologically significant and emotionally moving stories have in some form: the protagonist knows what she wants, but what she doesn’t know is that she really needs something else.
The same principle can be happy, too: what he wants is to pack a steamer trunk and sail to the South Seas, but what he needs is to realize how important he is to the life of his community and how much more meaningful that is than indulging his personal fantasies. (And every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.)
The want is the character’s motivation, usually what gets the events rolling, but the heart of the story is more often really about his or her need.
George Bailey doesn’t drown himself, so he gets a chance to learn the truth of his life and go home for Christmas. Oedipus learns his lesson too. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get it through his thick skull until the city’s falling apart, his mother’s dead, and his reputation is pretty thoroughly shot. But at their hearts, they’re the same essential story of individual will fighting and losing to a greater purpose.
Most strong stories (but not all) turn on people making decisions. They make choices early on that propel the story inevitably into its heart; then they make choices later that propel the story toward its conclusion. If the character evolves in the course of the story, then the later decisions will flow from the character’s “new self” just as organically as the early ones flowed from her “old self.”
Although your characters will make lots of decisions along the way, it’s helpful to turn the biggest events on two main decisions:
1. The one that kicks the story into gear in the first place (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “old self”).
2. The one that brings it all to completion (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “new self”).
You can think about the whole story as nothing but the process of that character changing from the person who made the first decision to the one who makes the second.
In Thelma and Louise, Thelma is given a hard decision at the start: stay home to please the husband she’s afraid of or go on a joy ride with Louise and risk his anger. Her decision is what makes the whole movie happen. Later in the story, Louise is wavering and confused, so Thelma has to make another decision: surrender to the mercy of the male world, or keep running and take control of their own destinies, even if that’s looking pretty hopeless.
In a sense she’s making the same decision both times: escape male power by taking off with Louise. But the difference in the two versions of Thelma who make those decisions—in the first following Louise’s stronger will, in the second taking over the decision-making for both of them—shows how she has changed. (Oh, and thanks to Jennine Lanouette here too!)
One could also argue that her second big decision is the final one: going over the cliff. Which is also a sort of follow-up to the original decision, but with a great deal more weight on it. On the other hand, one could say that that final decision was just the playing out of her earlier decision to keep running instead of surrendering. These analyses are all pretty flexible. The important thing is how they might help you see your own characters’ decisions—and therefore your own authorial decisions—more clearly.
Your protagonist’s decisions both force and reveal her development, and therefore they also carry your theme. Which means that if someone’s making crucial decisions in your story, then that someone should probably be your protagonist.
In fact, that can reveal who your protagonist is; because the question, “Who is this story really about?” is sometimes not as easily answered as you might think. In the beginning of Thelma and Louise, Thelma is the passive one swept up in a plot initiated by Louise, who suggests the road trip, shoots the guy, and then decides to run for Mexico instead of trusting the American justice system. But during all that, Thelma develops a stronger sense of self, and from about the middle of the story she drives the plot: she’s the one who commits the robbery and assaults the cop and so backs them into their fatal predicament, and she’s the one who wants to “keep going” in the final shot.
You could say it’s a story with two protagonists, but I find it more useful to think of the protagonist being Thelma: it’s the story of one woman’s journey from fear and passivity to courage and action.
Which brings us back to endings, because the ending of Thelma and Louise has everything to do with what it’s about. Had they gotten away, it would have been a story about how inner strength can conquer anything (Hollywood’s favorite theme for the past thirty years). But since they go over the cliff, it’s about how inner strength matters more than anything, even if you’re in a cruel universe that doesn’t give you any chance of conquering anything.
That’s why I suggest another exercise as you flesh out your story: try starting at the end and plotting backward.
Which really means: hold a general ending in mind without committing to much that comes before. Then ask yourself what events need to happen, and what elements you need in place, in order to set up that ending; then look at what you need to set up those events. Keep working backward. Build the pyramid down from its point. Break the river into streams and send them up the mountains. Reverse engineer the story.
Doing that will make even clearer what your creative decisions will have to be. It’ll reveal weak spots, too, places where you’ve let one event lead to another that doesn’t really move you toward your ending or throws your timing off. And remember, that’s a good thing, discovering your weak spots. It only feels bad for a little while. Then you fix it.
***
“Action is character,” Fitzgerald said. Which is true. But character is also action. And action is also theme, and theme is character, and all together they’re just story. Ultimately it’s all one. In this workshop, it’s that one thing, that singularity, that “what am I saying here,” that we’re digging to find. The rest will follow.
Monday, April 1, 2013
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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