How to use this Page

Throughout history, the influence of the full Moon on humans and animals has featured in folklore and myths. Yet it has become increasingly apparent that many organisms really are influenced indirectly, and in some cases directly, by the lunar cycle. Here are ten things you may not know concerning the way the Moon affects life on Earth.

The post 10 things you may not know about our Moon appeared first on OUPblog.

“There will be nothing left.”

(Spoken like a wolf about to strip the meat from the bones of a sheep.)

I’m always looking for a more visceral tease into the ideas I’ve laid down in “Story Structure to Die for,” and this one perfectly describes the tragic trajectory of every good protagonist. 

“There will be nothing left.” 

I tried it out this week.  I began my presentation with it and kept returning to it.  It’s from the Oscar-winning screenplay, Moonstruck.  

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is newly engaged to a momma’s boy.  Then she meets her fiancé’s estranged younger brother.  Ronnie (Nicholas Cage) is an animal, a “wolf” she calls him.  Ronnie is what Loretta needs.  But she is playing it safe in love.  She’s been hurt before.  Loretta is all about playing it safe.  But now, in Ronnie’s apartment, after a disagreement, he picks up his brother’s bride-to-be and drops her on the bed.  

“Take everything!” she cries, “leave nothing for him to marry,” to which Ronnie replies, “There will be nothing left.”

End of Act I. 

This is the writer telling us where the story is going.  I love it when that happens!

This is the writer preparing us for the heart of the story.  This is the writer telling us about the fate of every good fictional protagonist—she will be left with nothing.  She will be stripped of everything she believes in.  Why?  Because belief systems are prisons.  Prisons we chose to live inside. 

Every good story ushers the protagonist to her moment of truth where she is set free.

Nothingness may be our most precious possession

I’m always making a pitch for failure, but it’s a hard, hard sell.  Damned if people aren’t always clamouring for success.  Sure, all conventionally good stories depict a protagonist on a journey to accomplish something.  Something that will grace her life with more truth, independence, or freedom.  

But it turns out that freedom isn’t a function of acquiring anything.  It’s about losing, escaping, surrendering.  All good protagonists, after much suffering, come to understand this. 

The worthy protagonist discovers that freedom is about shedding what is false about him/herself.  Which is everything.

“There will be nothing left.” 

At the moment of disillusionment, the hero realizes that his whole life has been a bad habit, “the heavy curtain of habit,” says Marcel Proust, “which conceals from us almost the whole universe.”

Or “the luminosity of what is always there,” according to American poet Jim Harrison.

Or “the inexhaustible world that exists beyond our selves,” as novelist John Gray puts it.

“This nothingness may be our most precious possession,” says Gray, “since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves.” 

Story structure exists to deliver protagonists to this precious moment.  But they can’t see it coming, never do, never will.  Not even if the writer throws the hero on a bed and stands over her and growls:

“There will be nothing left.”

Readers pay to live vicariously through this nothingness.  It’s terrifying.  It is (arguably) the supreme human accomplishment. 

Dare I say it…?  It’s…it’s…