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When a drama rings true I want to cry. 

I do, it’s true, I confess, I’m hopeless, when the story rings true I just can’t help it. 

But in my defense let me put a finer point on this “ringing” business—I’m starting to say that the story has come true.  The protagonist has come true.  He or she has had a radical change of heart. 

There’s a word for that—METANOIA—look it up.  It really means a profound “change of mind.”  A no-going-back-to-the-way-things-were-before shift in worldview.  A new way of seeing things.

Take The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.  (What, you haven’t seen it?) 

An extreme narcissist is dragged (literally) through the Siera Madre mountains of Mexico to his agonizing undoing in the film’s penultimate scene.  It is so truly acted that there is no doubt in my mind that I am in the presence of the human organizm experiencing a universal repentance—a metanoia. 

Here is a character so utterly disillusioned, so emptied of his personal bullshit that he finds himself escaping the gravity field of his small self.  I’m sorry, but when I am present to anyone (virtual or not) breaking free, I weep with joy.  

Now, you might want to argue about how growth occurs.  It’s the old geological issue—evolution by infinitesimal increment over millennia, or through cataclysm.  Well, both as it turns out.  But the notion of sudden, terrifying, and radical metanoia is relatively new, and it still challenges many writers.     

Of course, explosive change is nothing new to Eastern traditions.  Zen monks, by their austere practices, cultivate the essential condition of “emptiness” that invites a new way of seeing things.  Even Christian mystics claim that true poverty of spirit “requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works.” ~ Meister Eckhart

My new best friend, the famous American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, went spelunking into this emptiness and returned with an appreciation of the mysterious Tao. 

According to Merton, we can’t begin to understand the nature of this charitable void “without a complete transformation, a change of heart, which Christianity would call metanoia.  Zen of course envisaged this problem, and studied how to arrive at satori, or the explosive rediscovery of the hidden and lost reality within us.”

Discovering their hidden selves, always painfully, this is what the best fictional protagonists do.  And by doing so—by freeing themselves—they make the human story come true. 

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada came true for me in a scene I can’t forget. 

The narcissist (and who isn’t one, really?), on his knees, emptied of his outmoded self, opens his arms to accept whatever punishment or grace existence may have in store for him.  This kind of surrender—whether explosive or discreet—is where we’re all headed. 

When I am witness to anyone breaking free, I am in profound sympathy with them.  It’s happening to me, there’s nothing vicarious about it!    

So let me ask you this—what if this was fiction’s function—to give us a taste of our own story coming true.