Rulebook Casefile: Wrapping Up the Internal and External Journeys of “Get Out”

Every hero must complete both an outer journey and an inner journey. These journeys should overlap at certain points, but not the whole time. Sometimes you can create a finale where the hero completes both journeys at the same moment (such as using the force to blow up the Death Star in Star Wars) but not always. Often, the hero must complete them at different times, but it’s good to have the culminations of these journeys both happen near the climax. Sometimes the hero completing the inner journey allows them to compete the outer journey right afterwards. Sometimes completing the outer journey allows them to complete the inner journey in the epilogue.

On first viewing of Get Out, the viewer is not super aware of Chris’s inner journey, though we can tell it’s there: He’s trying to forgive himself for doing nothing when he mother was dying in the street from an accident. We see Missy elicit this information from him while hypnotizing him, and we see him admit his feeling of guilt to Rose later, but then, since the outer journey is so exciting, we don’t really think about the inner journey very much.

But Peele is doing a lot of subtle work to make sure we feel Chris’s inner journey on a subconscious level, even if we don’t think about it. Only when you listen to the DVD commentary is all this work made explicit.

We can’t know this on first viewing, but Chris’s inner journey begins when he hits a deer on the way to see Rose’s parents. He insists on getting out to see if the deer is alright, but finds it dead. He then insists on calling the police, despite the fact that doing so often ends poorly for black men. To Chris, the deer is his mom, and he’s still trying to save her.

Later, when Chris has his bizarre encounter with Georgina, and sees her cry, he suspects that she may be a victim in some way, which also makes him think of his mom.

Later, when Chris is held captive in the basement, there’s a huge buck head on the wall. According to Peele, this represents Chris’s dad. It shouldn’t have been up to Chris to make sure his mom was okay, it should have been up to his dad, who “wasn’t in the picture.” Chris escapes and kills Rose’s dad by stabbing him with the points of the buck’s head. He is not only displacing Rose’s father as the dominant male in the house, he’s replacing his own dad. His mom is the deer and he is the rescuing buck his dad couldn’t be. As Peele says:

• The buck is of course not only a used not only to describe strong black men in the past, but is a symbol, the male version of the doe that he hits.

But Chris still needs to take one more step to resolve his inner journey. When he’s driving away from the house, Georgina, controlled by the grandmother’s mind, runs out to stop him but he accidentally hits her with his car. He then starts to drive away, leaving her limp body in the road behind him. Then he stops. He can’t leave her, even though he knows that the real Georgina is buried deep inside her and may never be able to be rescued. He just can’t leave a black woman dying in the street like his mom died. So he goes back, gets her unconscious body, and puts it in his driver’s seat.

In the end, it doesn’t work. She wakes up, still controlled by the grandma, tries to take over the car, crashes it, and presumably dies in the crash. But still Chris tried, and trying finally allowed him to forgive himself for not trying to save his own mother. As Peele says:

• When he went back for Georgina, he made the only decision that would free his soul.

What’s the point of including an inner journey so subtle that you have to watch the commentary to spot it? The hope is that, even if the audience doesn’t see it, they can feel it. We sense that there’s an elemental power in Chris’s use of the buck head. We sense that something deep is going on inside when he tries to rescue Georgina, even if we’re too caught up in it to think of his mom. “Know More Than You Show” doesn’t just apply to plot, it also applies to theme.

Straying from the Party Line: Chris’s Lack of Metaphor Family, Argument Tactic, Strong Motivation, Goals, Insistence, and Decision-Making Ability in “Get Out”

So according to our checklist, Chris seems like a rather deficient hero in Get Out. Let’s look at at all the character tests he fails:

Does the hero have a consistent metaphor family (drawn from his or her job, background, or developmental state)?	Just very slightly.  He talks a little blacker to Rod than he does to her (“Yo, you at work?”) but for the most part he speaks rather generically.  He’s code-switching, and around white people he’s studiously generic in his metaphor family.
Does the hero have a default argument tactic?	Not really, and he loses every argument he has in the movie.  He’ll try things like, “That was a dollar, you just threw a dollar out the window” when she throws away his cigarette, but it’s a halfhearted attempt and fails.
Is the hero’s primary motivation for tackling this challenge strong, simple, and revealed early on?	His motivation is that Rose is all he has in the world (other than his dog and Rod) but we don’t understand that until halfway through.  Before he admits that, we wonder why he’s putting up with this.
Does the hero have a false or shortsighted goal in the first half?	He’s not very goal oriented.  In retrospect, we can figure that he might have seen this as an opportunity to have a family again, but he mainly just pastes on a smile in the first half and doesn’t try hard to impress.  He’s very polite but not eager to please.
And is the hero willing to let others know that they lack his most valuable quality, subtly or directly?	He gently points out to Rose her seeming naivete, but mainly just reacts to everyone with pointedly-quizzical looks.  He laughs off Rod.
Does the hero have (or claim) decision-making authority?	Absolutely none, as Dean jokingly points out.  And she drove, so he can’t leave without her approval.

In the commentary, Peele points out something interesting:

• “I could talk all day about how amazing Daniel [Kaluuya, who plays Chris,] is. I mean, at some point we realized, y’know, Chris doesn’t have very many lines in this. And it’s true. His role is to just kinda get out of here without the shit hitting the fan. You know even in these scenes here [taking abuse from Jeremy at dinner] he’s just trying to minimize the awkwardness and make it through the weekend and get out, so that’s why he’s not gonna pop off, and of course, he’s in love, so we understand why you’re on your best behavior at your love’s parents’ house.”

Chris is told by Dean early on that his role as boyfriend is to say “She’s right, I’m wrong,” as often as possible, but of course there’s a racial component to that as well. Chris is expected to say that to every white person. When the cop arrives, the black man is in deadly peril, but the white girl has power over the cop, which she happily flexes.

As I say above, Chris shows more personality in his brief conversations with Rod than with anyone else. Long before he gets sent to the sunken place, Chris is hiding inside himself, and we understand that, so we still find him compelling in spite of his lack of some of the surface traits we crave. He’s somewhat self-less (but not selfless) and generic, but we sense more under the surface of Kaluuya’s performance, so we don’t reject him.

And it’s essential that we see his great photography at the beginning: the ultimate way to show the soul of the voiceless.

Rulebook Casefile: Ironic Special Skills in “Get Out”

James and I just sang the praises of Total Recall on our recent podcast, but we didn’t mention one of my pet peeves about that movie. Arnold eventually ends up strapped to a chair: He seems to have accomplished so much, but now he discovers that everything he has done was really just bringing him into Ronny Cox’s elaborate trap. Ronny has been playing ten moves ahead this entire time, guessing everything Arnold might possibly do and effortless manipulating him into bringing in the mutant leader. Now Ronny just needs to wipe Arnold’s mind again and restore his original personality.

But then Arnold does the one thing that Ronny couldn’t possibly have predicted: he raises his arm! He then breaks the chair, and runs away.

This drives me crazy: You could predict every possible movie Arnold could make, but you couldn’t predict he would raise his arm? Arnold doesn’t use some clever trick or special weapon he’s found as a result of his journey. He just does what anyone could predict he would do, and gets away fairly easily.

Chris in Get Out faces a similar predicament. He, too, ends up 2/3 of the way into the movie strapped to a chair, outdone by a villain who has been way ahead of him and manipulating his behavior the entire movie. He is even more helpless than Arnold, because the villains only have to ding a spoon on a teacup (live or on tape) to turn him to jelly.

So how does Chris get away? Unlike Arnold, he does something clever: He plucks cotton from his chair armrests and plugs his ears. (As Peele points out in his commentary, this black man ironically picks some cotton to avoid slavery.)  Assuming that he’ll be unconscious, Jeremy then frees him to take him to surgery, but Chris springs to life and knocks out Jeremy with a bocce ball.

But couldn’t the villains have predicted that, too? Why would they put him in a place where he would have access to cotton stuffing with which to plug up his ears? And wouldn’t a previous captive have figured out the same thing?

But this brings us to another very ironic special skill: When Chris is being hypnotized, he flashes back to when he was a child, watching TV, correctly fearing his mom had been in an accident, but doing nothing. We see that he was betraying his anxiety in only one way: He was obsessively scratching at the armrest of the chair he was sitting on. As he’s being hypnotized by Missy, he starts to do the same thing, but Missy doesn’t notice. When he’s in the basement, hypnotized off and on for days, he naturally does it again, until he’s ripped open the leather and exposed the cotton.

In a thriller, it’s essential to establish early on the special skills that will allow your hero to get out of trouble later, preferably something the villain could not guess that the hero would know how to do. Total Recall failed to do this, but Get Out does it in a very ironic and odd way. Missy does not suspect Chris’s real superpower: The obsessive ability to scratch open armrests, given enough time.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Have Your Hero Take Two Steps Forward and One Step Back

Audiences want heroes to change, especially at the end, but we also have our bullshit detectors going at all times. We know that we ourselves have failed to fix our own problems, no matter how hard we’ve tried, so we know that any change the hero makes will have to be hard-earned and limited to be believable.

In some movies, like Groundhog Day, the hero is totally transformed into a different person in the end …but only after being trapped in the same day for a very long time (In the screenwriter’s mind, it was more than 10,000 days, though the final film doesn’t seem to go that far.)

But in more realistic movies like Lady Bird, characters don’t get that much chance for transformation. Like us, they can only change so much. In return for our movie ticket, we’re going to demand some change, but we’re going to call bullshit if we get too much.

In any movie where a character refuses to be called by their real name, there’s a natural ticking clock counting down to when she “accepts herself” and acknowledges the name. (Of course, the concept of “real names” has been challenged quite a bit in the two years since this movie came out, but let’s not get into that) This movie does deliver the pay-off we expect, but it immediately undercuts that. She’s at a party at her new college in New York City and a cute guy asks her her name:

• COLLEGE BOY: What’s your name?
• LADY BIRD (considering): Christine. My name is Christine.
• COLLEGE BOY: I’m David.
• They shake hands.
• DAVID: You shake.
• CHRISTINE: I shake.
• DAVID: Where are you from?
• CHRISTINE: Sacramento.
• DAVID: Sorry, where?
• The music was too loud, he hadn’t heard her. Second try:
• CHRISTINE: San Francisco.
• DAVID: Cool! San Francisco is a great city.

So she actually takes two steps forward, admitting to her name and her city, but then she takes one step back, abjuring the city when she gets a second chance. We believe in her hard-won self-acceptance, because we see that it’s got limits.

She’s not Bill Murray, she hasn’t totally transformed, she’s changed just enough to gratify our investment in her journey, and it’s so much more gratifying because it’s so small and believable. We’re still rooting for her to one day admit to a boy that she’s from Sacramento, but we’d rather she be real than right in this scene.

Rulebook Casefile: How to Write a Comedy Without Jokes

In her DVD commentary, “Lady Bird” writer/director Greta Gerwig says

• “One thing that was really important to me is that none of the actors ever played the jokes as jokes, or the things that I thought would be funny, that they played them totally sincerely, and I cast actors who are allergic to anything that doesn’t feel true, and I remember talking to Saoirse early in the rehearsal process and she said, “Oh, I’m--I’ve never done a comedy” and I was like, ‘Don’t think of it as a comedy. Play it 100% real and it’ll be funny.’ And she did, and it is because the reason, I remember the first time I heard her read it, I was like, ‘It’s so much funnier because you’re believing it, 100%.’”

When I was trying to identify the moment of humanity in the first scene, I had a hard time identifying why I liked the heroine so much. She made me laugh, but I wasn’t sure how: Sometimes we like a character because they’re “laugh with” funny, and sometimes because they’re “laugh at” funny. Only certain types of “laugh at” moments make us bond with a character—the character has to unintentionally attract our laughter in ways we empathize with, often when a character is poignantly but humorously vain.

Lady Bird’s first line is slightly vainglorious: “Do you think I look like I’m from Sacramento?” We identify with the dissatisfaction, ambition, and self-consciousness inherent in that line, but we don’t really laugh with or at her yet. In the next scene, she says “I wish I could live through something,” which is also lightly vainglorious and poignant.

She then gets her closest thing to an intentional joke, but it’s still more laugh-at then laugh-with. Her mother is reminding her why they spend money they don’t have to send her to Catholic school:

• MARION: Miguel saw someone knifed in front of him at Sac High, is that what you want? You’re telling me that you want to see someone knifed right in front of you?
• LADY BIRD: He barely saw that.

As they used to say in the Borscht Belt: “These are the jokes, folks!” It’s a somewhat witty retort, but we’re not sure Lady Bird even knows that. Gerwig is having the actors play for emotion and throw their jokes away, literally. We laugh, sort of with, sort of at, but Lady Bird would be surprised either way if she could hear us out in the theater. The character and actress are just feeling the emotion and reacting honestly, and we find it funny, but that’s our business, not theirs.

This movie is a masterclass in how to write a comedy without jokes. “Cheers” writer Ken Levine wrote a great blog post on this many years ago. It’s a harder way to write comedy, but it can be the most satisfying kind for an audience, and the more emotionally fulfilling, because the actors get to be totally in it, facing inward instead outward.

Rulebook Casefile: The Writer Gives the Villain Her Humanity in “Lady Bird”

One thing made me a bit uneasy about “Lady Bird” as I watched it. Kyle (Timothy Chalamet) is the movie’s caddish villain, but we first meet him reading “A People’s History of the United States” and we know he’s getting his hooks into the heroine when she reads it too. Later, when she accuses him of tricking her into sex, he attempts to change the subject by saying, “Do you have any awareness about how many civilians we’ve killed since the invasion in Iraq started?” (And Lady Bird wisely says “SHUT UP. Different things can be sad. It’s not all war.”)

But I watched and thought “Hey, I was the kid who loved that book, and I opposed the previous Iraq war when I was in high school …Am I the bad guy here?” But I could tell the movie wasn’t really saying that, so I wasn’t really put off.

Nevertheless, I was gratified when, in the DVD documentary, Greta Gerwig recounts a conversation she had with Chalamet, after she made him read a lot of political stuff to prepare for the role:

• “And then he came back and he said, ‘You love this stuff!’ And then we had this whole joke, he was like, ‘The funny thing is that everyone will think that you’re Lady Bird, but actually, you’re Kyle,’ and I was like, ‘It’s true!’ Like when he says that thing about putting cell phones in our brains, I’ve definitely said things like that.”

It’s always good to raid your own life for specific details and gift them to your characters to make them come alive. Obviously, in an autobiographical coming of age story, Gerwig is going to give most of her personal details to her heroine, but she saves some for the other characters as well, even the villain—especially the villain, who is the easiest character to lose the humanity of.

I’ve talked before about how, in the opinion of actor Ronny Cox, all four men in “Deliverance” were aspects of novelist/screenwriter James Dickey. Every character needs humanity if they’re going to come alive, and there’s no better source of humanity than yourself. Thankfully, you contain multitudes. There are many people within you, so you can spread your humanity around.

Podcast Episode 11: Heroic Self-Interest with Geoff Betts

Hi guys, it’s time for another episode of the Secrets of Story Podcast! In this episode special guest Geoff Betts joins us to talk about Heroic Self-Interest and James pitches a new take on “Annie”. Check it out!

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 11: Heroic Self-Interest with Geoff Betts

Podcast Episode 10: More Fun with Jonathan Auxier

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 10: More Fun with Jonathan Auxier

Hi, guys, long time no see! Here we are with a new Podcast episode! Special Guest Jonathan Auxier returns to the podcast to give us some pushback for our last three episodes! It’s a good one! Exclamation point!

I also had some follow-up thoughts for those of you that have listened to it. Have you listened to it yet? Good, here we go: Jonathan points out that the Rank-Raglan 22-step structure wraps around to overlay on top of itself, with the hero going through the first 11 steps while the villain goes through the last 11. As I edited the episode, I wondered if that was true of Harry Potter, and it is true with Voldemort to a certain extent, but where it really applies is not to the villain but to the mentor, Dumbledore. Harry meets most of the first 11 steps while his mentor meets all but one of the back 11.

12. Marries a princess (often daughter of predecessor): This is obviously the one that fits the least since, as we later found out, he’s gay, but basically the princess is Hogwarts itself.
13. Becomes king: He’s offered leadership of the whole wizarding world but chooses to just rule the school.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully: For many years.
15. He prescribes laws: He also chairs the Wizengamot.
16. Later loses favor with gods or his subjects: People are constantly plotting against him in the books.
17. Driven from throne and city: He gets fired in books 2 and 5.
18. Meets with mysterious death: Seemingly killed by his follower, but there’s more to it.
19. Often at the top of a hill: He’s atop a tower.
20. His children, if any, do not succeed him: He’s childless, his killer takes his place.
21. His body is not buried: He is laid in an above ground tomb, which is later raided and desecrated.
22. Has one or more holy sepulchers or tombs: See above.

I thought that was neat!

Best of 2018, #1: The Favourite (And How Audiences Pick Their Favorites)

(Spoilers ahead!)

This year, The Favourite was my favorite (and wouldn’t it be nice if the Oscars picked it, just so that the headlines could write themselves?)

We’ve talked about the Villain Fake-Out before, where a supporting character turns out to have been the villain all along, but this movie does something more ambitious: Our hero gradually turns villainous, and her victimizer gradually grows more sympathetic.

The movie does all the work of making us fall in love with Emma Stone (First step: Cast Emma Stone), and we only belatedly say 90 minutes later, “Hey, why did I ever fall in love with this lady? She’s kind of terrible.” So we look back at what gave us the false impression that she would be a better lover for the queen than Rachel Weisz. We see the tricks they used:

• Stone is poor. She’s a cousin of Weisz, but her father has cost them everything, and now she must come begging for any job.
• Stone is humiliated: When she gets off a carriage seeking her cousin, someone sadistically kicks her and sends her sprawling in the mud. Later, she is treated terribly by the rest of the staff.
• Stone is “nicer”. The sexual relationship between Weisz and the queen has turned acidic. At times it seems they can barely stand each other, but the queen clearly needs Weisz, both sexually and for advice.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our poor, put-upon heroine could live out a Cinderella story, win the heart (and bed) of a royal and get to spend the rest of her life attending balls in the palace?

But it’s only when Stone is the new Favourite that we remember, “Oh right, bad people can be poor and humiliated, too.” And they can even be “nice”, when it advances their cause. As Weisz tries to remind the queen after she’s been forced out, a good lover should tell you when you look like a badger. Stone sees that the queen no longer wants honesty, and there’s a chance to steal her away with fawning lies.

We believe in all the characters, because the details in the movie are wonderful, but we care for and invest our hopes in Stone’s character only. Then we discover that her eventual success does not gratify our emotional investment like we thought it would. By design, we do not care for nor invest in Weisz’s character …until the end, when we re-evaluate our value system. The movie encourages us to question the ways that all movies get us to choose our favorite character, and realize that just because one character is clearly easier to care for and invest in, doesn’t mean that the easy choice is the right choice.

Best of 2018, #5: If Beale Street Could Talk and #4: Roma

On “The Secrets of Story Podcast”, James Kennedy and I just had a debate about passive protagonists. He argued that, as a story guru, I’m too predisposed to demand active protagonists and overly dismissive of stories about passive ones, even when that works better for the story, and he’s probably right.

How important is it to have an active protagonist? An active protagonist certainly makes it easier to fully invest in and identify with a story, but does that have anything to do with great storytelling? Movies with passive protagonists simply require more of the viewer. Instead of reaching out and pulling us in, they require us to step through the screen of our own accord. Is that a bad thing?

If Beale Street Could Talk and Roma are very similar movies. Both deal with poor, minority, working women in the early 70s going through a pregnancy without a father around (though the dads are missing for very different reasons). Each is structured around the course of the pregnancy without a lot of plot beyond that. In each, the heroine is very sympathetic but also relatively passive, making very few decisions until the very end.

So according to my book, neither movie should be very compelling. And yet they are. Why?

• Most obviously, because their suffering is very moving, in terms of the personal, systematic, and historical injustices they suffer. But according to my usual advice that should not be enough.
• The realism is rewarding. We revel in each movie’s ability to capture unique-but-universal little moments that make us say “Ah-ha, yes, life is like that, isn’t it?” We like that the movies respect our intelligence and don’t try to manipulate us.
• I think it’s key that these are the two best shot movies of the year (It’s an absolute outrage that IBSCT didn’t get a Cinematography nomination.) The majestic camerawork grants a power and dignity to these women’s lives that circumstances cannot.

I did not cry at either of these movies, despite their tragic endings. I was not put through the ringer or taken on an emotional rollercoaster. I felt somewhat alienated and distanced from these women, though I felt for their suffering very much. I was moved, but more on an intellectual level than an emotional level. Perhaps this is just because I am a white man unconsciously inured to the suffering of women of color. Perhaps it is because the movies did not grab me in the way they intended to. Or perhaps it’s because they had precisely their intended effect, preferring to be thoughtful rather than manipulative.

But I had no doubt that these were great movies that everyone should see, regardless of whether their heroes followed my rules.

Believe, Care, Invest in “Educated”

Okay guys, I’m starting to play around with the next book, and I’m considering the title, “Believe, Care, Invest: How to Get Everyone to Love Your Hero”. I think the heart of the book will be a walk though 10 novel examples, 10 movie examples, 10 TV examples, maybe 5 non-fiction examples, and 5 comics examples, a breakdown of the first page or chapter or 10 minutes of each, and how they get us to believe, care and invest. What do you think?

As proof of concept, let’s start with our most recent book. This is so masterfully written that I don’t have to go beyond the first page. We’ve even get Believe, Care and Invest pretty much in order!

Believe in: The best way to get us to believe in the reality of a character is through the use of vivid, specific, sensory details. Let’s look at the first two sentences of the book:

• I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt.

Right away in the first sentence, we have a person and an action, then we have a vivid image. Then in the second sentence we get a sensory description of the wind. This will not just be a book about what the heroine saw and heard, it’ll be a book about how her life felt in a tactile sense. Not a recitation of facts, but intimate feelings. Later in the first paragraph, we get:

• Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air... I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess

We get not just adjectives describing nature, but active verbs: dance, sway, quiver. Nature will be personified in this book. Young Tara will be reluctant to leave this mountain, even after suffering grueling abuse and neglect there, because she loves it like a person, a person who seems to love her back. These details get us to picture the setting vividly and thus believe in the heroine describing them.

Care for: The best way to get us to care for a hero is to watch them unjustly suffer abuse, neglect, or humiliation. In Tara’s case we get lots of neglect, right here on the first page.

• On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.

By which she means that she is neither schooled in town nor homeschooled --she just receives no education whatsoever.  First she shows us what’s going on through the image of the bus, then she confirms what we’ve just seen: Show, then tell. This will be true of the whole book, the only way we’re going to believe it is if she shows it all to us in vivid detail. We then find out just how extreme her situation is:

• Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.

These details help us both believe and care at the same time. I had never heard of kids in the 1990s without birth certificates before, and I thought as I read, “Who could make this up?”, which is exactly the sort of response you want while writing a memoir. And of course we’re now deeply worried about a heroine who’s trapped in an extraordinary sort of prison.

Invest in: Usually, the best way to get us to invest in a character is to show that she’s independent and capable, but young Tara won’t get a chance to show much independence from her family for a long time, so the book can’t begin with that (In fact, the first chapter will show just the opposite: A time she rejected a chance for independence). But this first page gets us to invest in an ironic way. It shows she was raised to be a bad-ass:

• I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves.

Ironically, she allows us to admire and idealize this manly man, the very image of rugged American masculinity. She then makes it clear she is his protégé:

• I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood.

We care for and invest at the same time here. We see that her parents are dangerous lunatics, but don’t you wish you could have gotten some of that training? And of course, her days will in fact be abominable, and she will have to survive them. Throughout the book, every time she survives horrific injuries, our heart will go out to her, but we’ll also admire her toughness.

We believe in, care for, and invest in young Tara Westover, all on this first page. We choose her to be our hero, instead of just going along with whatever is placed in front of us. This is how to get people to read and love your book.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: A Different Type of Agency in “Educated”

Tara Westover had a problem.  She knew the hero of her memoir “Educated”, her own young self, would be very easy to believe in, because of a wealth of detail (she kept journals at the time), and very easy to care about, because of the horrible abuse and neglect she suffered, but could the reader invest in her? 

Tara (I’ll refer to her younger self as “Tara” for the rest of these posts) will withstand a lot of abuse before she runs away. As with a teen in a horror movie, the audience will be shouting “Just get out of the house!” for the entire first half (then we’ll be shouting “And don’t go back!” for the second half, but she will continue to do so.) If her family loves her at all, it’s such a sick, twisted, toxic love that she’d be better off without it. We’re going to get frustrated as she stays. We know that it’s unfair to judge an abused child, but it’s hard to root for a heroine who doesn’t try to flee this situation.

But what choice does young Tara have? She’s just a child, totally cut off from the rest of the world until she’s 17: She’s never set foot in a school, never seen a doctor, she has no birth certificate, she is forced to spend her summers canning peaches and burying rifles in anticipation of the “Days of Abomination”.

Does the fact that she has little choice mitigate our difficulty in bonding with her? No, it intensifies it. We want our heroes to protect themselves, but we also want them to have agency. We want them to be making decisions. Preferably good decisions, but even bad decisions are better than none at all.

That’s why Westover’s first chapter is so brilliant. She can’t begin with her hero fighting back, but she does the next best thing: She begins with her younger self getting one chance to choose a better life and rejecting it.

The first chapter skillfully weaves together three different incidents that didn’t actually happen at the same time (and she makes that clear): Her father’s decision that the bible forbids milk (a metaphor for denying love), her father’s obsession with the fate of Randy Weaver, and an offer that Tara’s grandmother made to her around the same time: to abscond with Tara in the middle of the night, take her from Idaho to Arizona, and enroll her in school.

And Tara seriously considers it. She knows, on some level, that she’s being abused, that she should be in school, that her grandmother is trying to save her …but in the morning she hides until her grandmother leaves without her.

Tara lacks the self-preservation instinct we want in a hero, but at least she has agency in this one chapter. She has a better option, agonizes over it, and ultimately refuses to take it. This is not the first incident in the book chronologically, but Westover must begin here to get us to invest in the character, as much as we can. For the next two hundred pages, Tara will lack capability, but she will at least have culpability, and that is compelling in its own way. The story will have irony, because this horrible life will be a life she chose. That makes it far more meaningful.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: It’s Okay to Put Some Distance Between the Reader and the Character

I talk a lot about identification. It’s good to have your audience identify with your hero: experience the world through her five senses, take in all the same information, try to solve the same mysteries at the same time, etc (whether it’s first person or limited-third person.) And in many cases, the author will want the reader to reach the same conclusions, love the same people, hate the same people, share the same fears, etc. But not in all cases.

It’s a trickier way to write, but sometime you want to create some distance between your hero and your audience. I talked in this old post about the difference between the hero of the story and the hero of the scene: Usually Buffy was the hero of the episode, but when she had scenes with Willow, Willow was often the hero of the scene, correctly pointing out Buffy’s flaws, which Buffy often refused to admit. We knew not to trust Buffy’s judgment on many issues, though that didn’t make us like her any less (usually.)

But even when there’s no one to point out that the hero’s wrong, a prose writer can create distance between us and the hero, even just by telling us her obviously-overblown thoughts. The writer has various ways to let us know or suspect that the hero may have a distorted perception of her own life. 

Let’s look at Meg in Madeline L’Engle's “A Wrinkle in Time”:  I do wonder if adult reader and tween readers have different reactions to Meg: As an adult, it’s pretty obvious that she has bad self-esteem distorting her view of her world. We suspect that she’s not as weird looking as she perceives, and we even doubt that she really heard all these insults that she thinks she’s heard.

Certainly, when she soon meets a sports-star who thinks she’s beautiful (without her glasses on, anyway), we don’t think, “That’s odd, why is he attracted to this Quasimodo that everyone else finds repulsive?” Instead, we think “I knew she was wrong about her looks, and she was probably imagining some of the criticism.”*

We can also see that Meg is far too scared of her world. When the story begins, she’s cowering in terror from a storm outside, but we’re not so scared. She then gets very scared about reports of a tramp on the loose, but we guess that her fears are overblown. When it becomes clear that her five year old brother has been walking around in the woods and hanging out with the tramp (Hey, it was the ‘70s), and he says she’s okay, we’ve already figured out to trust his judgment more than Meg’s, though we still identify with Meg as our hero, not him. We believe that she’s real, we care about her, we’re invested in her goals …but we don’t trust her perceptions or judgment. We share her hopes, but not her fears, which is a tricky line for a writer to walk.

How does L’Engle do this? By giving Meg a level of hyperbole we don’t trust, but which we find endearing. When L’Engle writes “—I’ll make myself some cocoa, she decided.—That’ll cheer me up, and if the roof blows off, at least I won’t go off with it”, we look down on Meg a little bit, sure that her fears are overblown, but we’re bonded all the more with her as a result. We’re amused that she’s using her overblown fears as an excuse to have a sugary drink. Both the fears and the desire for cocoa are self-indulgent, and we’re amused by the confluence of them, in a slightly-paternalistic way. This is different from full identification, but not so different.

Next, we’ll talk about how this played out in the recent movie…

*I asked my wife, who loved the book as a tween and just read it to our daughter, if she thinks tween readers doubt Meg’s negative perceptions as much as adult readers do and she thinks tween girls at least totally identify with Meg, far longer than adults will, believing (and identifying with) Meg’s negative self-assessment, only doubting it a little when her mother says otherwise, and only seriously doubting it when Calvin says she’s gorgeous (which of course lets them fantasize that they will soon find out from a boy that they’re secretly gorgeous.)

New Video: Irony

Remember how shocked you were when I put out a new podcast episode, after more than a year away?  Well get ready to be flabbergasted, because here’s a new video after more than two years!  When I launched my book in late 2016, I had an ambitious plan that I would have a new video every other week from then on and a podcast episode on all the off weeks.  Ha!  Turns out that videos are a lot of work.  But I'm very happy with the four I’ve made and I’ve wanted to do a new one on irony for a while.  And I’m mostly talking about a movie we haven’t already discussed to death on the blog!  Let me know what you think, please.

(I’ve also replaced the Moment of Humanity video with a cleaner version, since kids like the videos.  No more 40 Year Old Virgin opening shot!)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Send Your Hero on External and Internal Quests

Most great stories don’t feature content heroes whose lives are upended by an inciting incident. It’s usually better to begin with a hero with a longstanding personal problem: an inner flaw (which they may not be fully aware of) has resulted in a series of social humiliations (which they are very much aware of) and they are starting to suspect that the problem is them.

When we first meet Meg Murry in “A Wrinkle in Time”, she’s hiding under a quilt, shaking in fear from a storm:

• She wasn’t usually afraid of weather.—It’s not just the weather, she thought.—It’s the weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.

We then find out she’s got a black eye from a fight she got in school that day, and she says:

• —A delinquent, that’s what I am, she thought grimly. —That’s what they’ll be saying next. Not Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father—
• But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her mother could talk about him in a natural way, saying, “When your father gets back—”
• Gets back from where? And when?

So already on the first page we have an outer quest and an inner quest. She wants to find her dad and to stop doing everything wrong. She then combines the two:

• Surely her mother must know what people were saying, must be aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it did Meg. But if it did she gave no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity of her expression.
• —Why can’t I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?

This isn’t a flaw we see a lot in stories: Meg wants to be cool, but not the way most tweens do—She wants to be internally cool. She wants to control her emotions. Later, her mother says:

• “You don’t know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling?” Mrs. Murry asked. “A happy medium is something I wonder if you’ll ever learn.

Of course, Meg is about to go on a big outer space quest to rescue her father, and she’ll literally find a personified Happy Medium out there. As in most science fiction, the hero’s journey into outer space is really a journey into inner space. It allows L’Engle to make Meg’s inner journey manifest in an exciting way.

In most great stories, there is both an outer quest and an inner quest: something the hero physically needs in the real world, and a change they need to make on the inside. The more elegant the story, the more the two quests will be intertwined. L’Engle does a fantastic job.