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The wait has been excruciating.  For me!  But finally…

STORY STRUCTURE TO DIE FOR is available as an eBook. 

There’s a link somewhere on this page, so go ahead and click it.  It’s FREE.  Free to download, free to pass on to your friends, and of course you’re more than free to tell me what you think of it.

My manifesto is short enough to skim in fifteen minutes.  I’ll be disappointed, though, if you don’t slow down, occasionally, to better understand…

• What are a story’s most basic building blocks?  (Not what you’ve been taught.) 
• What and where is the heart of your story?  (Writing manuals don’t even mention such a thing.)
• What makes a hero truly heroic?  (You’ll be surprised.)

One of my advance readers, a writing coach, wants to use STORY STRUCTURE TO DIE FOR as a resource with her clients.  She also said:

“Maybe I can finally find my way into the heart of my screenplay that has eluded me for years.”

I was so glad to hear that because a writer never knows if he’s making sense.  So you can imagine my relief at hearing such feedback.  Another writer loved its “simplicity and applicability”.  He said:

“[PJ] has managed to find a way of showing us what really counts in a work of fiction: that it has two stories and a heart.”

Another author with two novels under her belt said:

“Yesterday, my clouds cleared and the sun is shining in my head.  I know exactly what to do now to make my story better.  Thank you.”

I had no idea.

I sent my little manifesto off to UCLA.  The Screenwriting Department is run by Dr. Richard Walter, who kindly responded thus:

“I’ve looked over the pages. They’re great! Breezy and engaging but at the same time profound in their insights into the nature not merely of screenwriting but narrative expression in any and all forms, formats, and media.”<

I was having coffee with a frustrated writer. 

She couldn’t finish anything.  Her characters seemed to have forgotten which of her many manuscripts they belonged in.  My friend had no idea what her stories were about, and consequently she was “wasting a lot of time!”

So I laid my thesis on her.

Five minutes later her eyes had brightened with the recognition of the obvious and she hurried home without so much as a thank you.  But that’s okay with me because:
a) I’m familiar with that special urgency writers feel when a literary solution strikes, and
b) I want nothing more than to see this idea out there, in practice. 

Here’s what I told her:

Visualize your story as TWO STORIES.  Two successive stories separated by a moment so profound that everything that has occurred prior to this moment is sucked into it.  This sink hole is the HEART OF YOUR STORY. 

“You mean, there’s a hole in my story and everything’s flowing into it?” she chuckled ironically, sadly, questioningly.

Exactly.  Protagonist as slave to her desire—that’s your FIRST STORY.  Of course, story number one is more or less a tragedy—it’s the law of drama. 

Author and philosopher, Muriel Barbery in her novel “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” puts it like this:

“We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have.  We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory and our doom.  Desire!  It carries us and crucifies us.”

Strategies exhausted, the protagonist is horrified by their sense of emptiness.

“Okay, then what happens?” she asks.  “In the aftermath of this failure, this nightmare.”

“Not so fast,” I said.  “The protagonist needs to burn for a moment in the hell of her own making.  All good heroes possess what poet John Keats calls “negative capability”, the ability to allow things to fall away.  Very painful.  But remember, she has no other options.  There’s no way out. 

“Now the SECOND STORY is set to begin.  Your

You’re a writer.  So, you’re obsessed.  You’re thinking that your passion might be an affliction.  The time you’re wasting!  The money you’re not making!  The friends you’re losing!  Perhaps you need help.  Or, maybe you just need to listen to this:

I was gazing fondly at my tattoo this morning…

It’s a motif discovered on frozen mummies of Pazyryk horsemen living on the South Siberian grasslands 2500 years ago.  It’s a bighorn ram, in case that’s not self-evident. 

It struck me how much I still feel reassured by it.  No regrets at all about taking on this tattoo.

This ancient ram with its hind legs twisted upwards suggests (anthropologists say so) a passing to the other world.  It’s between worlds.  I’m a sucker for liminal zones, for border country, for that untouchable place where transformation happens. 

Sounds familiar! right?  The major turning point in any good story is often characterized by this same kind of “death”.   

I’m talking about the moment when the determined protagonist is forced into a dead end.  She’s finished with the world of conventional wisdom.  Finished!  With no apparent future.  The moment is both a crisis and a refuge.  Like the in-breath meeting the out-breath, a limbo. 

Pursue a desire (an obsession, a passion) far enough and we are cast painfully out of our known world and into this refuge.  Surprisingly, great things happen here.  People’s crusty old self-defeating habits die for want of appreciation.  In the emptiness, something arises.

Now, here’s the thing—we write to arrive at that moment. 

WE WRITE TO GET THERE!

WE READ TO GET THERE!

My Pazyryk ram—lingering between this world and the next—also takes me into that place of possibility. 

But more importantly, that’s why we write—passionately, obsessively, and without regret—so that we can tattoo the story we’re currently working on with such a deadly and at the same time positive and reassuring scene. 

That’s my story and it’s sticking to me.

 P.S.
Read my essay about Tattoos and the Heart of Fiction.
And two previous blog posts: Literary tattoos: girls, dragons, and Shangri-la, and Bringing your inside out.

Brit author, Anita Brookner, belittles one of her characters (named Bland!) by describing him as enjoying “undemanding novels”.  I suppose Brookner means “best-sellers”, not to be confused with serious literature of the kind she is famous for writing.   

I wonder if George Bland would like the book I’m writing now.  “The Dead Don’t Care” is terse, racy and full of action.  My ego shudders at the thought of being discussed as an “undemanding novelist”.  It’s going to be damn well written, all right?  I want to see that emblazoned on the cover, even if I have to put it there myself:

“Damn well written!”

Of course, the whole tone of “damn well anything” smacks of genre fiction.  And who reads genre fiction?  The great unwashed.  The Blands of the world demand a narrative that goes somewhere, a story with plot, a tale peopled with characters cursed with more determination that is good for their health.  We like people with brio enough to make mistakes; ultimately to ruin themselves, to hate themselves. 

Self-loathing – that’s a dynamic sure to set the human organizm to plumbing its own depths.  But you’ll hear the Lit-Nazis condemning unnecessary dramatics.  Plot is an artifice, tension an indulgence and character development fictitious.  Indeed. 

Here’s writer, Michael Libling, charging into the argument:

“I’d rather tackle a good genre story with likeable characters and a solid plot than wade through some impenetrable, self-indulgent and go-nowhere literary exercise that reeks of gimmickery.” 

Libling is responding to questions from Ramon Kubicek, whose new website features writer interviews. 

“There’s not much difference,” says Libling, “between literary fiction and porn; plot is secondary to both.”

Damn well said! 

Literary works seem to pride themselves on lack of plot.  But I think some so-called literary authors would have no idea how to extrapolate plot from a character’s desire.  Perhaps they simply don’t understand the mechanics of “story”.  A writer of “literature” may pride themselves on their lack of plot, but I’m betting that plot exists in their work.

Anita Brookner’s name is bandied about as a writer of “interior” go-nowhere novels, so I’m taking on “A Private View”.  I’m betting I find a character with an intention and action that grows from there.  I’m betting that this denigration of plot is just a literary conceit. 

I’ve only just begun the book, so I’ll keep you posted. 

Bland and his low-brow reading habits… I damn well like him already.

Why do we love stories?  Because we yearn to uncover hidden facts of our lives.

Why do we meditate?  Because we know there’s more than meets the eye.

Why are you reading this blog?  Because these posts seem to circle something important, which, if I were smarter, I could better articulate and move on to writing something more lucrative like reality TV.  That not being the case, I continue to make connections between things that I see and hear and read and…remember.

Such as that impossible little film called, My Dinner with Andre.

You’ll remember that it was a dinner and conversation.  A largely one-sided conversation.  The nerdy protagonist played by Wallace Shawn didn’t have many lines, and one of them kept repeating: “So, what happened next?”

It’s a classic storytelling situation.  The teller (Andre Gregory) takes the listener deeper into darker and more dangerously metaphysical spaces.

“Gee, Andre, what happened next?”

We are Wallace Shawn, story junkies straining to follow the thread as we anticipate the storyteller going too far.  What’s a story if it doesn’t eventually come to a stop by falling off the deep end?  That’s where it opens up.  It continues to move, but not at the physical level.  Physically, it has stopped.  The “stop” is key.

The story stop is really no different than the meditation stop.  Each one opens to an experience that is fleeting (more than likely) and formless.  Since everything about our lives is structured and programmed, this formlessness is frightening.  And that’s why “stopping” is so compelling.  It’s a No-Go zone. 

Eventually, of course, we all wind up there.  The Big Stop. 

Which is why some people meditate – as a rehearsal for their final act.

The Russian mystic, George Gurdjieff, regularly surprised his students with a command to “Stop!” during their workday.  They would freeze – to catch themselves being. 

Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf makes much of the stillness at the “dead of night”.  No better time to uncover the truth.  We are told, incidentally, that most births and deaths occur during that inarticulate gloom. 

And let’s not forget the Mayan calendar with its story of a full stop in 2012.  Millions of believers are leaning toward that supposed point of no return.  Subconsciously, it would appear that we yearn for the dead end of corporeal reality so that the veil might lift on the hidden facts of our lives.

End times are like that – revelatory. 

Until that fateful day, we’ve got medita

“If you wish to be a photographer, take a photograph.  If you want to be a better photographer, take another photograph.”  – Robert Capa.

And if you want to be a writer, then write.  One story after another.  Here we go again.  I’m doing it again!  I’m starting another novel.

Past attempts have taught me something about how fiction works.  The critical matter of a character’s intention, for instance.  And equally important, the forces that obstruct him.  (For a good discussion of “intention”, listen to this interview with Aaron Sorkin.)

Doing it again and again, I’ve learned how stories are really celebrations of human folly.  I’ve come to love the human organizm for its neuroses and delusions without which there’d be no story.  We humans cannot but go awry since it’s in our design.  We’re designed to make our way through life on the basis of delusional observations.  Our blueprint dictates that sooner or later we realize our efforts have left us empty-handed.     

I’ve learned this by writing and writing and writing and reading and reading and analyzing stories and scripts.  We are designed to risk and fail and then become gloriously disillusioned about it all.  That’s how we move beyond ourselves and into Act III.

Without stepping out of our comfort zone, there’d be no dark night of the soul, no Act II crisis, no reaching for a higher cause, no character unfolding, no good stories.  (No actual human evolution, either.)

Norman Mailer speaks about failure and suffering as part of the human design.  “I don’t think this is so awful,” he says.  “It is rather in the nature of things.”  By doing it again and again, I know what Mailer means.  It’s made me more sympathetic to my characters. 

I better understand Herman Melville when he says, “As for me, I am tormented by an everlasting itch for things remote.  I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.” 

We are heroes looking for trouble, accidents waiting to happen, blessed victims of life.

Fictional protagonists are the lucky ones.  Restless, naïve, impulsive, determined and above all not quite smart enough for their own good, travelers to the unknown attain something better than “own good”.  They glimpse something beyond.  Something large.  Something that embraces their own measly status quo. 

Whatever it is, it’s unquestionably worth all the trouble.  We’d do it again.  And we will, because we can’t go back.  We can only get better and better.  Which is a good thing because in the scheme of things, we’re still dummies.  There’s still such a long way to go. 

“If you want to be a better photographer, take another photograph.”

And another and another and another.

You wake at dawn with things on your mind—not the least of which is getting a new blog post out the door.

The antenna on the right side of your brain is therefore twitching in the direction of any idea on which to hang 500 words.

 It’s getting easier as time goes by because you have cultivated a talent for perceiving a nexus of meaning wherever you look. 

(What is this—the anatomy of a blog post?  Well, there…you see how easy conceiving a blog post can be.)

Let’s say your blog’s focus is: “THE FACTS OF LIFE as revealed in fiction”.  Your beat has broadened (mercifully) to art, essays, interviews, reviews and cultural rants of all kinds including those found in other blogs.  There’s a plexus of blogs out there, a force field in which all bloggers have become one virtual organizm, feeding off each other in a kind of e-symbiosis.  It’s called the blogosphere, and it’s a great place to e-forage.

For the sake of this exercise, let’s visit a blog that I have pillaged recently and perhaps a tad too often.  (I do have the blogger’s permission—very important.)  Here for example is a recent item exploring the dynamics between lies and honesty:

“We live in an age of lies.  In the moments we use them, it seems as though they give us an advantage. In actuality…” 

You can hang your blog post on the coatrack of that thought, no problem!  Your blog, after all, is largely about showing how fictional characters must necessarily suffer the consequences of their folly.  Lying to ourselves pretty much defines the human condition.  

“In actuality they (the lies) disconnect us from reality and soon nothing is workable, because we have no traction with the truth.”

Absolutely.  Writers force their fictional heroes to live a lie until the skidding begins—until they reach the point where, as Rick Lewis says, “nothing is workable”.  This is nothing less than the all-important Act II crisis, where the protagonist hits the wall head-on.  Old strategies—based on a deluded sense of self—prove powerless to effect the change they want.  Every protagonist has an existential crisis, a “who am I?” moment.  Then it happens.  The sea-change:

“The smallest act of honesty is like drilling a new well; a rich source of power, life, and energy for ourselves and everyone around us.”

This moment—when the hero opens to a new way of seeing herself—is a moment with a thousand faces, and your blog, like a paparazzi, shoots them as they appear. 

You pray that this short post is useful to someone.  That it’ll help someone perceive crisis and struggle as part of the very real human plot.  That it will encourage someone to be a little easier on their imperfect self.  And to accept that being imperfect is part of our perfect design.

So, there you have it—a blog post.  It only remains to invent a catchy title, a phrase that will excite a search engine.  You review your post for ideas or words you like—like “nexus” and “plexus”.  Hmmm…

With apologies to Henry Miller…

Before you die, see the film BLOOD WEDDING. 

En espagnol, “Bodas de Sangre”. 

It`s a flamenco ballet based on the play by Federico Garcia Lorca. 

Here’s a 10-min YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWvM2VlRD6k

And with that, my good deed is done for the day.  But who am I to leave well enough alone?

I want to describe to you (you don’t see it in the clip) the final scene.  The bride, her wedding dress smeared with the blood of her rival lovers (they’ve just killed each other), faces the camera in the final image.  Her expression—all horror and hopelessness—is what the filmmaker choses to leave us with as we fade to black>>>.

Tragic, yikes!—but it’s something else that has me spellbound.  Something more elemental.  Much less emotional.  Once identified, it`s obvious—the heroine has reached a full stop—with her eyes wide open.  She is profoundly present. 

Presence.  Such an everyday word, such an underrated state of mind. 

I’ll go out on a limb and say that presence—and the hankering after it—is synonymous with the spiritual search.  Or, if that’s too far-fetched, consider this:

That the obligation of Art is to provoke this altered state.  Forget about beauty and truth.  If art can bring us to a standstill, can centre us in the moment, however briefly, it has done its job.  While nothing much may appear to be happening during this break in continuity, we feel its power. 

Power to accomplish what?  Does it matter? 

Presence is a radical awareness, whose chief feature is equanimity.  What’s in a tab of acid?—equanimity!  The blood coursing through our veins, a distant dog barking, a memory—their boundaries melt away.  Of course, the drugless way to such objective bliss is a total commitment to life.  A going for broke.  Going so far past the point of no return that death looks good compared to the more horrendous disillusionment.  Flamenco with all its do-or-die passion seems to be about nothing else but breaking your heart. 

Blood Wedding would seem to have as its aim the taking away of every last scrap of the bride`s identity.

And this is where the artist leaves us—with an end so brutally absolute that its only possible function can be as the quiet seed of a new beginning.  A moment devoid of future and of past.  Devoid of any story at all.  A moment present to nothing but the space out of which new things come.

Olé!

Take any story.  Take this little movie I saw the other night, for instance: Seducing Dr. Lewis.  You’ve never heard of it and neither had I.  My partner borrowed it from our local library.  She likes films shot in the Canadian outback, especially rural Quebec.  But I digress…

Take the protagonist of this story, the mayor of a village desperate for jobs.  He hears of a company scouting locations for a new factory.  Imagine the grubbing together of the mayor’s hands in anticipation.  The town only needs to meet a few demands, the most challenging of which is a resident doctor. 

Log line: mayor of an all-but-dead town must attract and seduce a big city doctor to the back of beyond.

The thrust of the story is delightfully obvious.  Mayor rallies residents to put on a false face.  Town dupes doctor into believing he’s arrived in Shangri-la.  Mayor over-reaches.  Mayor gets his comeuppance, etc.

You can take that juicy little précis and run with it to any story department. 

After years of analyzing stories for why they work (or not), I became aware of a dynamic more profound than the textbook “conflict-crisis-resolution”.  It is something else that compels us to journey with fictional characters, something darker and more glorious.  Something to do with their suffering.  Protagonists can’t escape suffering.  They never win without first losing.  It’s a law.  We know this to be true for ourselves, as well.  And we hate this fact of life.  So, naturally, it compels us.  What we hate is this:

We are PRISONERS of our desire.

Take the mayor—he’s not just motivated by his goal, he has become the goal.  The protagonist is the plot.  The mayor is undifferentiated from his desire.  We call him the hero, but what’s really heroic is this:

How the mayor escapes from the prison of his desire—now that’s heroic.  That’s what we’re anticipating.  Never mind that the doctor is won over (sure it’s a lovely resolution) but it’s not why we’re discreetly wiping away tears.  The mayor has come face to face with a most perplexing feature of human existence—that we’re hard-wired to learn the hard way.  That the human organizm is not designed to be fulfilled by satisfying our desire. 

Realizing that, the mayor (the protagonist, you, me) is able to appreciate the beauty of truth. 

We see this happening in stories all the time.  This always happens.  It’s a law of some kind.  Look for it.  Desire takes us 99% of the way…and the courage to finally forsake it takes us the last mile home.

Happy birthday to me!

It’s been one blog-year since I began discussing how ‘desire’ fueled Bella’s quest in the Twilight series. Fifty-odd posts later and I’m still fixated on fictional characters and the sea-change they are forced to undergo as they pursue their goal.

Why am I hammering away on this theme? Because the heroic journey may have something to teach us about the “meaning” of our own lives.

(This is, after all, The Meaning of Life blog.)

And, quite frankly, nobody else out there is examining ‘why we read’ or ‘how fiction works’. Not in depth, anyway. For this reason, I feel compelled to exhaust my thoughts on the subject.

HERE’S MY THESIS: when the protagonist prevails, it’s not simply a product of their intelligence and determination – although those qualities are critical. It’s not just that heroes grow incrementally wiser with each set-back – although they certainly do. No, the dynamics that characterize the endings of most good stories are fueled by something other than the tired old rational mind. The mechanics of a character’s transformation are governed by laws of a mystical nature.

[Mystical: adj. relating to a unifying principle of life.]

The successful protagonist is forced, painfully, to see the limits of the mind. Its strategies have failed him. By breaking with the mind, the hero opens to a wider, more objective, view of reality. He sees the bigger picture. He sees something closer to the truth.

It’s no wonder we watch films and read novels. Instinctively we know that our own destiny lies on the other side of a heroic journey. In the meantime, the vicarious epiphanies we get from bookstores and cinemas provide a kind of stop-gap fulfillment.

Stories of almost any kind and calibre show us how the human organizm ‘grows up’…and it’s not a pretty sight. Like your average protagonist, we are meant to follow our deepest yearnings and suffer the consequences. We are meant to fail. We are meant to exhaust ourselves in the process. As a last resort we rail against the world. Reaching new depths of self-pity, we begin to hate ourselves.

From this lowest and sorriest state of affairs we start our resurrection as more compassionate persons – understanding of others but also of ourselves. It appears to be a miracle, but in fact it’s the wonderfully cruel way we are designed.

You could say that this process – always so frightening – is the meaning of life. I do, as you know.

To those of you who have become regular readers – and to whoever logs on occasionally to see what the heck PJ is on about today…

Here’s looking at you.

Oh, sure, we’re full of hope for a while. That’s what the middle of a story is all about. Try, try, and try again. All for naught. By any definition of drama, the antagonistic forces must be greater than the hero’s efforts.

In my weekly class, “Don’t Get It Right, Get It Written”, I’ve been hammering away at the importance of seeing the protagonist’s journey as a necessarily tragic one – all the way to the Act II crisis. If you could interview a worthy protagonist at this threshold, she must (by definition) consider this to be the very “gates of story hell”.

Why hell? Because ye who are determined to go ‘all the way’ (see previous post, “Perfect Laughter“) must leave not just your shoes but also your mind outside these gates. Why the mind? Because with its one foot in the past and the other in the future, the mind is not capable of recognizing the opportunity available in a present moment that’s going…all to hell.

Unquestionably, the mind has proven insufficient for the job. The only way to divest oneself of the liability that the mind has become, is to abandon all hope of it leading to a solution. Hence:

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

At this critical point, we fall under the influence of something more akin to our soul (about which I make no claim to knowing anything).

We read novels and watch films for the vicarious thrill of living the hero’s conundrum as she is unwittingly confronted with Dante’s dictum. In real life – once we’ve lived enough life and read enough books and watched enough good movies – we can practice abandoning hope in our everyday lives.

I know, I know, it’s a paradox: give up hope in order to open to all that is hopeful about our higher natures.

Sounds like grist for another blog post. One that I promise will be less inscrutable than this one.

“How Fiction Works“, by James Wood, is a recent book with a refreshingly non-instructional approach. I was surprised to find no discussion sympathetic to my notions of ‘why fiction works’. Wood doesn’t even mention the defining moment in a story – the protagonist’s turning point – with which I appear to be as obsessed as if it were the meaning of life.

In a way, this is good news, because it means that I’m trying to convey something that’s either above or below the radar of other literary critics. Fortunately, it would appear that I have a supporter in Eckhart Tolle. Tolle isn’t in the fiction business, rather he trades in hard-core reality. He’s a great promoter of the advantages of adversity.

Here he is, just the other day, dispatching his weekly e-message to those of us who find his insights irresistible:

“One could say that going through loss is the great awakener.
It is a potential opening if you don’t run away from it.
What is usually condemned as ‘bad’ by the mind and the mind-made self is actually grace coming into your life.”

‘Going through loss’…by definition this is the hero’s journey. Protagonists fight a losing battle until they ‘wake up’. The key, according to Tolle, is ‘don’t run away’. Mere mortals, of course, chose the path of least resistance.  Avoiding ‘bad’ experience is most everyone’s tragic story. The radical outcome of Tolle’s prescription is ‘grace’. Waking up changes everything.

In films, that grace can be seen in the character’s demeanour. Think of Rocky on the night before his big fight. His ego, having already taken a beating, he visits the fight venue and wakes up to his limitations. The realization transforms him physically as well as mentally. The swagger gone, he walks with dignity. A small but important detail.

You notice the same miracle in Moonstruck. The Nicholas Cage character (Ronnie) wakes up to his self-pity and becomes transformed physically. At the outset he’s as dark and deformed as Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge, whom he’s meant to represent. But having won Aphrodite’s heart (Cher), he walks tall into the final confrontation of Act Three.

This isn’t the first time I’ve borrowed from Mr. Tolle, and I doubt it’s the last. I’m gratified that the lessons I see coming out of fiction are roughly those taught by a spiritual teacher. Given how much time we spend reading books and watching movies, we can be assured it’s time not so badly wasted.