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It is time for some book confessions and I have got a real strange one to confess. Some people break spines, some read the last page first, mine is completely different. I first really noticed this while reading the Russian sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky. I was half way through the […]

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