Storyteller’s Rulebook: Everybody on TV Is Bad at Their Job (Except On “Law and Order”)

Back in the day, “Law and Order” would try to compete for Emmys, but it would never do as well as its rival, “NYPD Blue”. It was understood that “Law and Order” was the more frivolous show, because it was strictly about the cases, whereas “NYPD Blue” was a true drama, because it was equally about the case of the week and the lives of the detectives at home.

One of the reasons that seemed more artistic was subtext: If we were following both a home drama and a work drama, they could complicate and inform each other, and each one would be packed with subtext because we knew about the other. When they talked about the case we would see that they were really talking about their homelife drama, and vice versa. “Law and Order” couldn’t work on multiple levels like that.

But I preferred “Law and Order”. I always thought that “NYPD Blue” should maybe have a different name: “Shitty Cops”

If, week after week, your policework is affected by your homelife, you’re a shitty cop. And if your policework is constantly emotionally affecting your homelife, you’re a shitty spouse. Give me the cops of “Law and Order”, who pass the basic competency bar of leaving their homelife at home.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love lots of shows wherein home and work dramas get intermingled. As long as the show acknowledges that this is a serious failing on the hero’s part.

Dre on “Black-ish” is played by a former “Law and Order” detective, but he acts more like an “NYPD Blue” cop.  He lets his work drama drive him to make volatile and disastrous decisions at home, and his home drama drives him him to make volatile and disastrous decisions at work. Then, as he will every week, he gets his shit together, corrects his way of thinking, and fixes both situations. 

When he calls his family meeting, he begins by saying, “I may have to be ‘urban’ at work, but I’m still going to need my family to be black. Not black-ish, but black. We are going to keep it real.” The family meeting does not go well, making him more upset, and at the end he announces: “Tomorrow I have a very important presentation to make and you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go in there, I’m going to keep it real as [unintelligible]”. The actions he takes both at home and work create train wrecks, primarily because they affect each other.

This is all well and good. This is a comedy, and Dre, unlike the cops on “NYPD Blue”, is a buffoonish figure. It’s fun and believable to watch his homelife and worklife negatively affect each other …And besides, it’s just advertising. I’m not being asked to root for him to save lives. He can screw up an ad campaign without any killers going free, so it’s all fun and games.

Rulebook Casefile: Playing with Expectations in the “Black-ish” Pilot

Kenya Barris knows we’ve seen pilots before, and he knows we’re trying to get ahead of him. So he plays with us.

We meet a wealthy, overconfident man with a closet full of individually lit sneakers, and he assures us in voiceover that he’s absolutely sure he’s going to get a big promotion today. He promises his family and co-workers it’s coming. Then his boss gathers everybody in the conference room and announces that sure enough, someone is going to be promoted to Senior Vice-President. Our hero confidently picks up his stuff and begins moving over to the “senior management only” side of the table before the boss announces the name. On the way, he cockily says to a woman of color: “Sabrina, I’m not going to forget about you when I become one of them, alright?”

It’s only after Dre has shoved others aside to take his new place that the boss finally announces, “So without any further ado, I’d like us all to give a warm congrats to…”

…So what’s going to happen? Well if we’ve ever seen a pilot before, we’re sure of one thing: Dre is not going to get the promotion. Everything in the pilot so far has set us up for a big reversal. Overconfidence must be punished! But then Dre does get the promotion! We’re shocked. Why did they try so hard to set us up for a reversal and then not deliver?

But there’s one hitch: Specifically, his boss announces that he’ll be “the SVP of our new Urban division.” And Dre has already told us in voiceover that he considers “urban” to be a ridiculous term. Dre is clearly not pleased, and says in his voice-over, “Wait, did they just put me in charge of black stuff?”, then we cut to commercial.

So why did Barris push all of our “they’re about to announce someone else got the promotion” buttons, only to have our hero’s overconfidence be validated after all? Well, it sends us on an emotional rollercoaster: We’re excited for him, then worried about his overconfidence, then almost pitying his delusion that he’s going to get it, then shocked to be happy for him …then shocked again when we realize that, in Dre’s mind, this is a slap-down. As far as he’s concerned, he didn’t really get a promotion. He’s only been put in charge of his own ghetto. Sure enough, when he gets home, his father calls him, “head puppet of the white man.”

Burris has toyed with our pre-existing narrative expectations in order to convey to us the hero’s peculiar emotional state. This moment establishes the tone of the whole series: Dre is a winner but his psychological and cultural baggage makes him feel perpetually dissatisfied. As in any good ironic story, he’s either winning by losing or losing by winning. 

It’s always good to hurt your hero in ways that would only hurt your hero, because then you have a unique and volatile main character. Only Dre would be heartbroken by this news, and that makes him compelling.

Storyteller's Rulebook: Superlative Writing Basics in "The Intuitionist"

As I said yesterday, there were several elements of “The Intuitionist” that made it hard to identify with Lila Mae. So if I was alienated from my hero, why did I keep reading? Simply speaking, when the writing is this good, the author earns a lot of leeway. Ultimately, novel writing comes down to the basics: great words, great sentences, great paragraphs, and great chapters. Let’s look at some:

Whitehead uses adjectives that we can vividly see but we’ve never heard before. 

• “The light at this hour, on this street, is the secondhand gray of ghetto twilight, a dull mercury color.”
• A character has a “Hieroglpyic squint”
• “All of the Department’s cars are algae green.”
• A large bed is “swimmable”
• He uses great sensory writing (and another great adjective): “The hallway smells of burning animal fat and obscure gravies boiling to slag.”

Every one of Whitehead’s character descriptions are delightful. 

• She thinks about the men who have come before and sums one up quickly: “Martin Gruber chews with his mouth open and likes to juggle his glass eye.” 
•  Later, we get to go into the head of one of the mafia goons searching her apartment: “He’s still searching for a concordance between the loss of his virginity (purchased) and an ankle sprain (accidental) exactly three years later, give or take an hour. John is sure it will come, awaiting another item in the series or a new perspective on the extant ones. No matter.”

Whitehead’s street description are great: “It is situated in the heart of the city, on a streetcorner that clots with busy, milling citizens during the day and empties completely at night except for prostitutes and lost encyclopedia salesmen.”

He does a great job job of breaking up sentence into shorter sentences in order to convey skepticism: “A regrettable incident in Atlanta kicked up a lot of fuss in the trades a few years back, but an inquiry later absolved Arbo of any wrongdoing. As they say.” Inserting that period takes the place of unneeded sentences, adjectives, and adverbs.

An aspiring novelist might find it worth their time to simply transcribe this novel and chew over every sentence to learn how to write.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: It’s Hard to Shout Your Humility to the Hills

So let’s talk about a fundamental problem with stories like The Farewell. 

Perhaps my favorite novel is “A Fan’s Notes” by Fred Exley. Like this, it’s a barely-veiled autobiographical story about Exley’s personal journey to humility. He spends the book dreaming of being a great novelist, then realizes at the end that he’s not destined for greatness, but is, at heart, a fan, fated to live through the greatness of others.

It’s overwhelming, heartbreaking, and totally convincing when he comes to this realization.

…but then, of course, he turned this realization into a Great American Novel! It never made him a household name but it ensured he could spend the rest of his life teaching novel writers in Iowa until he drunk himself to death.

It’s hard to publish a story about how you learned humility, because shouting your story to the masses is a profoundly un-humble thing to do.

This paradox is perhaps even more evident with The Farewell. The movie’s tagline is “Based on an Actual Lie”, and it was promoted as the true story of how writer/director Lulu Wang was convinced to go along with her family’s decision to lie to her grandmother about her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis. In the end, we cut to real footage of Wang’s grandmother and a title tells us, “Six years after he diagnosis, Nai Nai is still with us.” We are invited to consider that she’s still alive because of the lie.

But then Wang made herself world famous by turning the story into a very successful movie, and, inevitably, this led to her grandmother finding out about her diagnosis! According to the movie’s implied logic, this might kill her!

But this is something that all writers go through, even if we’re not claiming to write about our own lives: We suck up the lives and experiences of our loved ones, process them, and then trumpet them to the world. It’s been argued that you know you’ve written a great novel when you get banned from your home town (true of writers from Dante to Joyce). You’re hoping to find universal truth, but as a result you’re hoping to become rich and famous, which could not be less universal.

Will Wang be welcome at the next family gathering? Will she be blamed when Nai Nai does eventually die? Is weathering those accusations worth achieving fame? That’s a decision every semi-autobiographical writer must make for themselves.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Specificity is Universal

Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” says of its creation: 

• “We originally had very little hope of its ever being produced. On the surface, it seemed to have very little commercial appeal. After all, we were writing about a community of poor Russian Jews facing a pogrom - a very unlikely subject for a musical. There was, in fact, very little enthusiasm from producers about presenting the show. But we kept working on it because we loved the subject, we loved what the show was saying, and we felt very close to the material.

He talks about going to the first Japanese production:

• “Japan was the first non-English production and I was very nervous about how it would be received in a completely foreign environment…I got there just during the rehearsal period and the Japanese producer asked me, ‘Do they understand this show in America?’ And I said, ‘Yes, of course, we wrote it for America. Why do you ask?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s so Japanese.’”

Likewise, in the DVD documentary, Anna Wang talks about The Farewell:

• “When I first told my parents that I was gonna make this film, they were sort of skeptical, because I showed them the script that I’d written and my dad said ‘Yeah, this is how it happened, but why does anybody want to see this, y’know?’ They were shocked that anybody was willing to give me money to put these mundane details of our lives, of our family life up on a big screen”

She goes on to say:

• “These details, they’re not boring, and they are worthwhile on a big screen, and so, I didn’t really know how people would respond, because I dove into the specificity of my family, and so to see the response at Sundance, to see people saying, ‘Oh, this is so universal, the story is so universal, these characters are so universal, this family is so universal.’ It’s so meaningful because it speaks to the fact that you can fine universality through specificity and that a story can be universal because of the specifics and not in spite of them, and so I think that my biggest dream is just that this opens doors for other filmmakers to tell their own specific stories and that people are gonna be more inviting to let filmmakers tell their own stories and do it on their own terms.”

Specificity is universal. The reason it works is because of scenes like the one I discussed yesterday, where the family winds up having a comedy of errors at the grandfather’s grave. The whole point of the scene is that this would only ever happen in China, where they have very particular graveside traditions that seem absurd to outsiders, even to a granddaughter who was born there but moved away young.

But because the details of the scene are so oddly specific to one culture, they feel universal.

To a certain extent, both Stein and Wang said, “Fuck it, I’m not going to write about a de-racialized plucky everyman hero in an attempt to ingratiate myself with the storytelling public, I’m going to write a story that only I can tell about my own people that will probably only appeal to my own people, but it’s the story I want to tell.”

Audiences worldwide are more likely to identify with specific, odd, absurd details that we haven’t seen before than we are to identify with “universal” details that we’re already familiar with. Judaism has very little in common with Shintoism, but if you write a very Jewish story with enough specificity, many Japanese people will say, “This was written just for us.”

Storyteller’s Rulebook: How to Write Dramedy

Dramedy is a tricky genre. We’ve looked at Sideways, which has some broadly comedic scenes, some entirely dramatic scenes, and lots of wry scenes in between, but The Farewell represents a different sort of quiet dramedy that constrains itself into a narrower range, never really allowing us to laugh out loud, but gently teasing out the inherent ironic humor of its situations throughout. 

Let’s look at a great quietly-comedic scene, when the family visits the grave of Billi’s grandfather. As with many other scenes in the movie, we’re observing a Chinese cultural ritual that is baffling to Billi. 

 We have just heard the mom complain about how China has professional criers at funerals, then we cut to an ostentatious crier at a funeral, so we’re invited to assume this is a professional another family has hired.

Meanwhile, Billi’s family have brought the grandfather’s favorite foods to put on his above-ground tomb. they fight over whether they have to open the bags of cookies and/or peel the oranges (“Yes, peel them, otherwise he can’t eat them”).

Billi’s dad then tries to lay a lit cigarette on his father’s tomb but his mother objects:

• Grandma: Don’t give him cigarettes, he quit!
• Father: He didn’t quit.
• Grandma: He did! A week before he passed, he quit.
• Father: Dad just told you he quit, but he never quit!
• Uncle: Ma, let the man smoke! He’s already dead, what else can happen? Enjoy the cigarette, dad.

Eventually, they just start eating the food themselves and having a good time. Then the scene gets a bit more serious as grandma asks, “Why’d you have to leave us so early?” The answer, as we learned elsewhere in the movie, is that he had cancer and she didn’t tell her, driving home the gravity of Billi’s decision. 

Indie dramedies thrive on this sort of not-quite-laugh-out-loud scenes full of wonderfully ironic comedy, often hand-in-hand with the movie’s drama.  A solemn ritual results in petty bickering. A dead man isn’t allowed to smoke.  Lots of big and little lies are told, all in the name of genuine love and affection. The whole movie is right here.

Storyteller's Rulebook: Create a False Mystery

I haven’t mentioned it in years, but one of the two screenplays I got that won some money and got me signed by a big-deal manager was my biopic of Alan Turing. It had a lot of big fans in Hollywood but they said they couldn’t make it because Turing was gay, so my manager gave up on it. A few years later, social mores had changed, and another Turing script went out, which sold for a million dollars and won an Oscar. Oh, well.

When I was structuring the script, I decided to play a trick. My script covered many years and ended with my hero’s suicide, which is kind of a bummer. I decided to begin with the discovery of his body and have a government investigator suspect foul play and reconstruct the story of Turing’s life. In the end: Nope, it was just a suicide. But the false mystery provided more structure than the script would have had otherwise.

“Little Fires Everywhere” does a similar thing. The Richardson house has burned down and everybody naturally suspects daughter Izzy, who has disappeared.

• “What’s so funny?” Lexie said.
• “Just picturing Izzy running around striking matches everywhere.” He snorted. “The nutcase.”
• Moody drummed a finger on the roof rack. “Why is everybody so sure she did it?”
• “Come on.” Trip jumped down off the car. “It’s Izzy. And we’re all here. Mom’s here. Dad’s on his way. Who’s missing?”
• “So Izzy’s not here. She’s the only one who could be responsible?”
• “Responsible?” put in Lexie. “Izzy?”
• “Dad was at work,” Trip said. “Lexie was at Serena’s. I was over at Sussex playing ball. You?”
• Moody hesitated. “I biked over to the library.”
• “There. You see?” To Trip, the answer was obvious. “The only ones here were Izzy and Mom. And Mom was asleep.”
• “Maybe the wiring in the house shorted. Or maybe someone left the stove on.”
• “The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” Lexie said. “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.”
• “We all know she’s always been mental.” Trip leaned back against the car door.
• “You’re all always picking on her,” Moody said. “Maybe that’s why she acts mental.”
• Across the street, the fire trucks began to reel in their hoses. The three remaining Richardson children watched the firemen set down their axes and peel away their smoky yellow coats.
• “Someone should go over and stay with Mom,” Lexie said, but no one moved.
• After a minute, Trip said, “When Mom and Dad find Iz, they are going to lock her up in a psych ward for the rest of her life.”
• No one thought about the recent departure of Mia and Pearl from the house on Winslow Road.

We already sense that Moody is, in some ways, smarter than his brother and sister, and he has his doubts about Izzy. Then Ng points out that nobody has connected the fire yet to the disappearance of two more people: Mia and Pearl. The implication is clear: Izzy probably didn’t do it, and the reader is invited to spend the book trying to guess the real culprit.

And in the end, we find out the culprit is… Izzy, working alone, who went around the house starting little fires everywhere, just as Lexie and Trip assumed. It was a false mystery, tricking us into reading avidly. 

 
But ultimately it’s fair, for the same reason my own false mystery was fair, because Turing ultimately was sort of murdered by a larger conspiracy, and lots more people were ultimately responsible for the complex chain of events that led Izzy to start the fires. It turns out to be worthwhile, in both stories, to closely examine the events leading up to this tragedy to discover the complex web of ill-will that led up to it. 

 
Both stories are fairly diffuse, and brought into sharper relief by beginning with a flash-forward and a false mystery. It’s a devious trick, but I recommend it with some stories.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Necessity of Personifying Nature in “Educated”

We already talked about personifying nature with “The God of Small Things”, but Tara Westover in “Educated” does it even more so, many times over on her first page.

As I said last time, Westover has a problem, in that we will want Tara to run away from her family home long before she does, and then we’ll want her to stop going back, which she will not do until the final chapter. (In the end, she says she’ll keep visiting other relatives in Idaho, but seemingly never again her parents or her mountain.)

How can Westover help us understand her decision?

• First, she must make Tara’s relationships to her family complex: None of them is all bad. They all love her in their own insufficient and/or twisted ways. We can even understand the appeal of “Shawn”, her most abusive family member. We understand how she would keep trying to get the love she’s lacking from these people, even though we can see long before she can that she never will.
• Second, there’s a big element of wish fulfillment in self-sufficiency. The first sentence recalls “The Boxcar Children”, a book about orphaned kids in the depression that kids nevertheless read as wish-fulfillment, dreaming of living on their own wits and whiles in the woods. The mere fact of not being protected at all is seductive, both to young Tara and to the reader.
• Third, there is a character that Tara can have uncomplicated love for, one that it will be the most painful to leave: The mountain itself.

You often hear said of good books that “The setting is a character”, but that’s especially true here. Let’s just focus on examples from the first paragraph.

• The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling.
• Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air.
• Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base.
• If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.

Two pages later, she will soon explain that there is an Indian legend that says the mountain is a princess:

• My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home.

Her family is hard to love, but who wouldn’t want to have their own beautiful mountain, literally right out of a fairy tale? To leave the mountain is to leave her own princess-tale.

Let’s look at one more sentence from the second paragraph:

• The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads.

This is beautifully written and very seductive. We will want to read the book for its lyrical power, and for the way it will get us to fall in love with nature again, as we would fall in love with a lover. And we will understand Tara’s love. Even when it seems like her parents want her dead, she will have the Princess to love and the Princess will seem to love her back, in its anthropomorphized way.

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.

The Ten Urges That Stories Can Satisfy

Hi guys! Sorry, I’d meant to do another book before Christmas but time has gotten away from me. Instead, let’s just have one big blow-out December post. I’ve talked about urges in the past, but recently, in giving someone notes, I had to get more specific about what I was talking about, so I came up with a possibly-complete list of the ten urges that stories can satisfy. Most stories should satisfy 3-6 of these (though Rushmore seems to only do two).

• To Laugh (Comedy, everything else)

Almost every story can benefit from a dose of humor. It’s easier to identify with funny heroes. Funny sidekicks, love interests, and even villains can also increase our enjoyment of a story. On the flip side, laughing at a hero or side kick’s foibles, bad luck, or cluelessness can also bond us to them, since it gives us permission to laugh at our own failings.

• To Gasp (Thriller, Horror, Action)

We gasp when things are shocking or horrific. This can also be referred to the “edge of your seat” quality.

• To Swoon (Romance, everything else)

We want to share a hero’s romantic hopes and fears. We want to share their yearning, to have that yearning thwarted painfully, perversely punished, and finally gratified (or tragically thwarted once and for all, which brings us to our next urge…)

• To Cry (Romance, Tragedy, Drama)

We cry when things are tragic. Things are most tragic when they’re bitterly ironic. When the hero simply fails despite their best efforts, that’s just a bummer, not tragic. When they fail because of their best efforts, or realize they must choose to fail, the tears come.

• To Dread (Thriller, Drama, Tragedy)

The deepening sinking sensation that something awful is going to happen is perversely pleasurable for an audience, all the better if we’re not exactly sure what form the disaster will take.

• To Speculate (Science Fiction, Fantasy)

Sci-fi and fantasy are very different, but most fans of one are also fans of the other, albeit less so. They both offer the thrill of escapism: to imagine a world wildly different from our own and to wonder at possibilities we’ve never considered (which gives us the hope that maybe more things are possible here.)

• To Puzzle (Mystery, everything else)

Almost every story can benefit from adding a big mystery and/or a series of satisfying mini-mysteries to solve along the way. Sometimes we’re solving the mysteries alongside the hero, sometimes they’re only mysteries to the audience.

• To Burn (Historical Fiction, Drama)

Can one “enjoy” a movie like 12 Years a Slave? On some odd level, yes, because it’s pleasurable to burn with righteous indignation at the sight of injustice. 

• To Lust (Romance, everything else)

This frequently but not always overlaps with swooning. We like to be turned on. In books, we mostly just lust in sex and seduction scenes, but in movies we can have the visual pleasure of sexiness onscreen in every scene.

• To Cheer (Action, some Horror)

Once we’ve gasped, we want to release that tension by cheering. In horror, this only comes at the end, but in action stories we get lots of chances to cheer throughout. Any genre can have “stand up and cheer” moments.

And now here are two massive charts. Above, you’ll find one for the books we’ve looked at (It’s good that I have enough data to start some crunching!) and below you’ll find one for the movies we’ve looked at:

What do you guys think? Are there any urges I’ve missed? Do you disagree about the urges these stories fulfill?

Rulebook Casefile: Three Rules vs. False/Corrected Philosophy in 27 Movies

In the comments last time, Patrick asked me to clarify the difference between the three rules a character lives by and the false/corrected philosophy, so I thought I would look at our 25 movies. The answer is that, sometimes the three rules I identify all line up with the false philosophy and get rejected; sometimes they all provide good guidance throughout; sometimes some must be rejected and others not; and sometimes they are hastily rejected and must be rediscovered by the end.

The 40 Year-Old Virgin: In this case, his three rules are tied to his false philosophy, and he must reject all three to become happy:

• Three rules: Keep your head down, avoid conflict, avoid women.
• False Philosophy: “I respect women. I love women. I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them! I have a very fulfilling life!”
• Corrected Philosophy: Well, at the ¾ point, when he’s supposed to adopt one, he actually regresses, but at the end, he does come to reject that philosophy. “I love you.” “I was scared.”

Alien: In this case, her first rule is the same as her false philosophy, but her other two rules turn out to be even more true than she at first realizes:

• Three rules: Stick to procedure, do it myself, I deserve respect.
• False Philosophy: “Whatever happened to standard procedure?”
• Corrected Philosophy: “We’ll blow it the fuck out into space. We have to stick together.”

An Education: In this case, she rejects her three rules early and has to rediscover them by the end. These rules, which turn out to be wise, are different than her false philosophy, which is indeed wrong:

• Three rules: Study hard, be smarter than others, get ahead
• False Philosophy: False advice: “My father would say there’s no point to going to concerts.” He also says that Oxford doesn’t want people who think for themselves
• Corrected Philosophy: In this case she quickly goes too far in the other direction, enjoying going out too much and thinking for her own too much instead of trusting adults who love her, then at the ¾ point she must find a middle ground: Reacting to teacher’s place, “I’d love to live someplace like this…That’s all you need, isn’t it?”

The Babadook: Her rules are the same as her false philosophy.

• Three rules: I can handle it, don’t tell me how to raise my son, look forward.
• False Philosophy: ”I’m fine.” There’s no monster. “He doesn’t need a monitor.” “I have moved on, I never mention him.”
• Corrected Philosophy: To her husband’s ghost: “You’re trespassing in my house.”

Blazing Saddles: His rules turn out to be good guidance throughout.

• Three rules: I can win anybody over, I’ll shake it off, There’s a smarter way to do this.
• False Philosophy: When he rejects the advice of his friend not to hit the boss and says “I have to.”
• Corrected Philosophy: He learns to make friends and influence people, white and black…but he’s still violent to those that need it, so he doesn’t correct that far.

Blue Velvet: For good or evil, he sticks to his rules.

• Three rules: Look under rocks, you only live once, I can get away with anything
• False Philosophy: “I’m just real curious” “I don’t want to cause any trouble.” “no one will suspect us because no one would believe two people like us would be crazy enough to do something like this.” He believes that he’s fundamentally different from Frank.
• Corrected Philosophy: Not really: he remains conflicted throughout. When Detective Williams says “You’re all through with this now?” he responds "Yes sir, I sure am,” but he continues investigating. Later, he says to Sandy, while holding Dorothy, “Forgive me, I love you.”

The Bourne Identity: His rules turn out to be good guidance.

• Three rules: Identify the exits, identify the threats, avoid capture
• False Philosophy: He keeps saying “I just want to find out who I am”, but eventually he comes to want more.
• Corrected Philosophy: He learns to be happy with the present and says that he doesn’t want to know who he is anymore.

Bridesmaids: She doesn’t have rules she lives by. She’s lost in self-doubt.

• Three rules: Not really. She doesn’t really have much of a self-image, or self-esteem, or set of principles. Maybe: I deserve better. (The most self-destructive rule one can have)
• False Philosophy: “I’m not looking for a relationship right now.” About being a bridesmaid: “I’m more than happy to do it and it’s not too much.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “I’m not okay.” “Things are going to change but they’ll be better.”

Casablanca: The first rule is his false philosophy and gets rejected, the second he manages to hang onto a little bit despite his personal crisis, the third remains good guidance:

• Three rules: Don’t get involved, everything is amusing, don’t buy and sell human beings.
• False Philosophy: “I stick my neck out for no one.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”

Donnie Brasco: We sense that he will try to learn to live without these rules once he uses them to succeed and then returns to his family.

• Three rules: “Don’t say nothing unless there’s a reason for it.” Always stay in character. Be the colder one.
• False Philosophy: “I gotta shave my mustache off. Regulations.” He’s trying to play if by the book, in both jobs.
• Corrected Philosophy: “Fuck the rules.” 

Do the Right Thing: His first two rules are his false philosophy, his third remains good guidance.

• Three rules: Gotta get paid, don’t mess up my business, don’t put up with mistreatment
• False Philosophy: “Gotta get paid”
• Corrected Philosophy: We can sense that the mayor’s words are now echoing in his head: “Always do the right thing.”

The Fighter: His rules remain good guidance.

• Three rules: “I’m no stepping stone, that’s not who I am, the next one’s gonna show who I am.” nobody better mess with my family. “I’m gonna pick my punches.” “I’m a boxer, not a brawler.”
• False Philosophy: He starts out with the right boxing philosophy, but he says about his brother, “nobody pushes me harder.” That’s wrong.
• Corrected Philosophy: He has found a fiancé who pushes him harder in better ways, but he has overcorrected, totally rejecting his brother in favor of his fiancé, but he can only win once he learns to say “I want you both in my corner”

The Fugitive: His rules provide good guidance, though at the very end, after the climax, he realizes that it’s finally time to stop entirely relying on himself.

• Three rules: Figure it out, help others, rely on yourself.
• False Philosophy: Kimble: Just barely, but when he finally realizes that they suspect him and he says “How dare you?”, that shows his naiveite. Gerard has a much clearer one: “I don’t care.”
• Corrected Philosophy: Kimble: Sort of: “I am trying to solve a puzzle here.” (aka I can’t trust in others to find the right answers and I need to rely on myself.) Also: “To see a friend” (aka evil is all around me and I’ve been too trusting.) Gerard: At the ¾ point he says. “That company is a monster.” (aka, “I’ve been looking for evil in all the wrong places.”) At the end, when Kimble says “I thought you said you didn’t care,” Gerard replies, “Don’t tell anybody.”

Groundhog Day: His first rule he may stick with, but the other two are part of his false philosophy.

• Three rules: Sort of: Be funny, tolerate no sentiment, I deserve a bigger spotlight
• False Philosophy: Dozens: About Rita: “She’s fun, but not my kind of fun.” “People are morons.” Etc.
• Corrected Philosophy: At the ¾ point: “Only God can make a tree.” At the end: “no matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now”

How to Train Your Dragon: His one rule turns out to be good guidance throughout.

• Three rules: not really. He’s very open to change. Just one, maybe, something like “I can build something to solve this.”
• False Philosophy: “Taking down one of those would definitely get me a girlfriend!” “no one has ever killed a night fury, I’m going to be the first.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “It’s not the dragon I’m worried about.” “I’m not one of them”

In a Lonely Place: His first rule is good guidance, his second and third turn out to be bad (but they’re different from his false/corrected philosophy)

• Three rules: One day I’ll write something great, I won’t be insulted, I must never show my real emotions.
• False Philosophy: “She’s right, I am nobody.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

Iron Man: Interestingly, he changes, but not as much as he could. He goes from being a bad person to a good one, but he decides that he can still live well, be smarter and be cool.

• Three rules: Live well, be smarter, be cool
• False Philosophy: “My old man had a philosophy: Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “I’m going to find my weapons and destroy them. I’m not crazy, Pepper, I just finally know what I have to do, and I know in my heart that it’s right.”

Raising Arizona: He has none.

• Three rules: He thinks he does (he has vague notions about what it means to be a man) but in reality he gets pulled in different directions and talked out of things easily.
• False Philosophy: Accepts bad advice from Gale: “Sometimes your career (crime) has to come before family.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “You were right and I was wrong. We got a family here and I’m gonna start acting responsibly.”

Rushmore: Like Tony Stark, he becomes a much better and humbler person, but still retains a lot of cocky swagger, and doesn’t really reject these three rules, which are different from his false/corrected philosophies:

• Three rules: Do more. Impress everyone. Prove I’m smarter.
• False Philosophy: ”What are you going to do?” “The only thing I can do: try to pull some strings with the administration.” “When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.”
• Corrected Philosophy: ”I’m just a barber’s son.” About his plan for the aquarium (and therefore his crush on Ms. Cross): “I gave it to a friend.”

The Shining: Neither hero has much sense of self.

• Three rules: No, Jack’s lost and has no self-image. Danny doesn’t really either.
• False Philosophy: Jack: “That happens to be exactly what I’m looking for.” Danny: “I don’t want to talk about Tony anymore.”
• Corrected Philosophy: Jack’s philosophy never corrects. Danny’s does, but he doesn’t verbalize it.

Sideways: His love interest never actually asks him to drink merlot, but we sense that maybe he would for her by the end. His other rules are tied into his false philosophy.

• Three rules: “I AM NOT DRINKING MERLOT!” I’m too good for this (job/girl/situation), etc.
• False Philosophy: “[Dating is] not worth it, you pay too high a price.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “This has been a big deal for me.” In this case, the further hardships cause him to regress, not progress, but the progress he’s already made finally pays off much later.

Silence of the Lambs: Her rules provide good guidance throughout.

• Three rules: Be humble, work hard, get ahead
• False Philosophy: Bad advice given by Crawford: “Don’t let him get into your head.”
• Corrected Philosophy: “Quid pro quo, Dr. Lecter” you have to make yourself vulnerable in order to understand evil.

Star Wars: He realizes his rules were false, but then they become true.

• Three rules: I deserve better, I know what I’m doing, It can’t be that hard.
• False Philosophy: “It looks like I’m going nowhere.” “I see, Sir Luke” “No, just Luke” (aka, “I can’t be a knight”) Later, he says, “I can’t get involved. I’ve got work to do. It’s not that I like the empire, I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now. It’s such a long way from here.”
• Corrected Philosophy: Equally talking to himself: “Come on! Why don't you take a look around? You know what's about to happen, what they're up against. They could use a good pilot like you.” Later accepts advice: “Use the force”

Sunset Boulevard: Life has stripped him of his self-image before the story begins. But he still has a false/corrected philosophy.

• Three rules: No. He stands for nothing. He has no self-image.
• False Philosophy: “I heard you were one of the ones with talent.” “That was last year. This year I’m trying to make a living.”
• Corrected Philosophy: Realizes that it’s not worth humiliating himself to make a living in Hollywood: “I’d take it in a second, but it’s a little too dressy for sitting behind a copy desk in Dayton, Ohio.” But he doesn’t get out quickly enough.

And our new one, Selma: As I pointed out last time, in this movie the three rules are also the special skills and they’re basically the “false” philosophy as well, but the “correct” philosophy is only a slight variation. When King turns back the second march, he decides to temporarily halt demonstrating and resisting until he gets the okay from the courts, and that works, and he wins, but the movie in no way wants to condemn the original trio of skills/rules/philosophy. In this one instance, it made sense to temporarily suspend two of them to get over the finish line, but the original strategy was still a good one and gets most of the credit for the final result. This is not a classic “corrected-philosophy” moment, because King does not now decide he was wrong to demonstrate in the first place.

• Three rules: ”We negotiate, we demonstrate, we resist.”
• False Philosophy: Sort of. He acts as if he expects Johnson to do the right thing without pressure, but he’s already planning to apply that pressure (“Selma it is”). His philosophy is basically farsighted and rightheaded from the beginning.
• Corrected Philosophy: Sort of. He doesn’t frame it as changing his mind, but rather tries to explain his decision as a tactical retreat. But nobody really buys that he hasn’t reversed himself.

Basically, it’s a matter of moral and ethics, which is always a sloppy distinction with a lot of overlap. The three rules have more to do with ethics/tactics, while the false/correct philosophy has more to do with morals/beliefs/outlook. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don’t.

Rulebook Casefile: How “The Hunger Games” Fills the Reader In on What’s Going On

Let’s look at how the first chapter of “The Hunger Games” parcels out information.

• Katniss wakes up, sees her mother and sister, interacts with cat, mentions to us that it’s Reaping Day but doesn’t explain what that means.
• Katniss goes out the door, sees the town, explains to us what District 12 and the Seam are.
• She slips out through the fence, mentions that her father died in a mine explosion.
• She gets her bow, explains black market economy and peacekeepers.
• She meets up with Gale and they eat, and she tells us about the capitol.
• They find the black market, then interact with the mayor’s daughter, in her nice reaping clothes. They discuss the mathematics of who will get chosen, which we don’t understand, then, as they leave, Katniss explains the system to us.
• Katniss returns to her family and they go to the Reaping. Katniss explains to us how the lottery works.
• Katniss sees the officials lined up. For the first time, she tells us the story of how North America became Panem, then she explains how the Hunger Games works.
• Effie addresses the crowd. Prim is chosen.

So over the course of ten pages, we gradually find out everything we want to know, and it’s very effective. Let’s look at other ways Collins could have done it.

• The book could have done what the movie did: The movie just begins with onscreen text explaining in a few paragraphs what the Hunger Games are, before Katniss is introduced. Then we get a snippet of Caesar Flickerman interviewing the game-maker Seneca Crane, where they fill in more of the what the games are, then we cut to District 12 (identified by an onscreen title)
• On the other hand, it could have all been mysterious until we arrived at the Reaping at which point Effie could have described everything to the crowd (even though they already knew it)
• Even past that, they could have waited to actually show us what the Hunger Games were.

The book on other hand, makes good use of first-person direct address. Katniss just tells us everything we need to know, in little pieces, sometimes motivated by something she sees, but sometimes not. The key is that it’s all interspersed with action and dialogue. She’s up and about, visiting several locations, hunting and killing, having several conversations while she’s telling us all this.

She also tells it to us in the most intriguing way possible: She first mentions Reaping Day and the Hunger Games without telling us what they are. She lets us dangle for a few pages, and engages in some dialogue about it with others that we don’t understand, and then, once our interest is built for a while, she finally explains to us what they each are.

We get the information fast enough that the book can get going quickly, but just slowly enough that it never feels like an info-dump. It’s a model of how to set-up a future world.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Juxtapose the Melodramatic with the Mundane

It’s hard to care about melodrama. When characters are feeling huge emotions about huge events, the natural tendency as a reader is to roll your eyes and say, “Whoa there, it’s too big, too much, too silly.” All we know are our piddly little lives. We don’t know what we would do in these shocking circumstances and we can’t imagine.

So it’s hard to write big shocking moments without losing your audience. But here’s a trick: juxtapose the melodramatic with the mundane. Here’s Katniss when her sister’s name is called:

• There must have been some mistake. This can’t be happening. Prim was one slip of paper in thousands! Her chances of being chosen so remote that I’d not even bothered to worry about her. Hadn’t I done everything? Taken the tesserae, refused to let her do the same? One slip. One slip in thousands. The odds had been entirely in her favor. But it hadn’t mattered. Somewhere far away, I can hear the crowd murmuring unhappily as they always do when a twelve-year-old gets chosen because no one thinks this is fair. And then I see her, the blood drained from her face, hands clenched in fists at her sides, walking with stiff, small steps up toward the stage, passing me, and I see the back of her blouse has become untucked and hangs out over her skirt. It’s this detail, the untucked blouse forming a ducktail, that brings me back to myself.

We’re in the same position as Katniss: Only the untucked shirt makes it real to us. It’s too hard to comprehend the horror that a twelve-year old will be sacrificed in a future gladiatorial game. It’s absurd. It’s too big. But an untucked shirt is small. We can comprehend that. It’s real. And if it’s real, juxtaposed with the other, then the other must be real as well.

A twelve year old, telling us about the wild gladitorial dream she just had, wouldn’t mention that untucked shirt. It’s too mundane. That’s the sort of detail you would only notice if you were actually there. So when we see it, we’re suddenly actually there.

The more outlandish your scenario, the more important it is to include little glimpses of mundane details, just to make it real.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Get to the Premise Quickly (Even if It Means Skipping Some Set-Up)

So we get to the Reaping in “The Hunger Games”, and they’re going to read out the names of the tributes. First we hear the female tribute: Oh no, it’s Katniss’s sister Prim, who we care about! Then we hear the male tribute and it’s…Peeta Mellark! And we say, “Who?” We’ve had the chance to meet various villagers that morning, but not Peeta, so the name lands with a thud.

Then Katniss fills us in that she’s not close with Peeta, but she does know him and like him because of something nice he did for her a while ago.

Why not establish beforehand who Peeta is, so that his name will have an impact on us when it’s read out? Because there’s just not time. A little set-up is fine, but the reader wants the plot to start going as soon as possible.

If there’s time, then there’s some value in letting us know who someone is before something happens to them, but not if it takes too long. The book is called “The Hunger Games”, not “Life in the Seam”, and we want to get to find out what that is and begin the process.

We have about ten pages of set-up (most of which is action in the woods). During that time we get to meet three possible female tributes: Katniss, Prim, and the mayor’s daughter, but we only meet one potential male tribute: Gale. If Collins had introduced Peeta during this time, she also would have had to introduce some other men so it wouldn’t be too obvious, and we could have some shock that it’s Peeta. (Also it would be too much of a coincidence if Katniss had only interacted with a few people that morning and two of them had their names called. It’s far more believable that she only met one that morning.)

Finding out a reason to care about Peeta after his name is called works out fine. Collins knows she can just make us care retroactively, after the name fails to get a reaction from us. In fact, we’ll care more. She’s lost the potential for shock, but she knows we’ll feel more for Peeta’s backstory now as a result.

Rulebook Casefile: The “Drown the Cat” Intro in “The Hunger Games”

The late Blake Snyder wrote three great books of writing advice that are still widely disseminated today, but I have a problem with his central piece of advice, that heroes should be introduced by a selflessly heroic moment in which they “Save the Cat.”

“The Hunger Games” takes a different path. Let’s look at the third paragraph:

• Sitting at Prim’s knees, guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Mashed-in nose, half of one ear missing, eyes the color of rotting squash. Prim named him Buttercup, insisting that his muddy yellow coat matched the bright flower. He hates me. Or at least distrusts me. Even though it was years ago, I think he still remembers how I tried to drown him in a bucket when Prim brought him home. Scrawny kitten, belly swollen with worms, crawling with fleas. The last thing I needed was another mouth to feed. But Prim begged so hard, cried even, I had to let him stay. It turned out okay. My mother got rid of the vermin and he’s a born mouser. Even catches the occasional rat. Sometimes, when I clean a kill, I feed Buttercup the entrails. He has stopped hissing at me.

I guess you could say she saves a cat…from her own murderous impulses. But she still describes her as disgustedly as she possibly can!

Why do we like this nasty heroine? In the parlance of my book, we believe, care and invest:

• Believe: This one paragraph does a great job showing a consistent worldview. Every word is colored by a very unique way of seeing the world. She doesn’t seem like an accumulation of author-imposed traits. She seems like a fully-realized human.
• Care: She’s suffering and doing what she can to survive. If she was living a comfortable life in the suburbs, we would hate her for wanting to kill a cat, but seeing her hunger, our heart goes out to her. We wonder what we would do.
• Invest: We definitely trust her to solve whatever challenges this book offers. She’s bad-ass, and she’s ready to make hard decisions.

Don’t worry, Katniss does get a chance to kill a cat a few pages later:

• Then when this crazy lynx started following me around the woods looking for handouts, it became his official nickname for me. I finally had to kill the lynx because he scared off game. I almost regretted it because he wasn’t bad company. But I got a decent price for his pelt.

All of this cat killing ironically sets us up for her one big moment of selflessness later. If Katniss volunteered for the Hunger Games because she was a super-nice person, we wouldn’t buy it. It’s only because she’s so vicious that it’s believable and compelling.

Storyteller's Rulebook: Coin Unique Similes

People read “Gone Girl” for the crackerjack thriller plot, but there are dozens of clever thrillers published every year. Why did this become such a phenomenon? Because the actual writing is also pretty great. The book makes great use of language.

It’s hard to write unique similes. In our actual lives we fall back on familiar similes as much as possible, so it’s believable enough when your characters do that, but your readers don’t want to read that. Familiar similes are stultifying to readers. They’re a waste of space. Readers crave unique similes, even if it’s not entirely realistic that your narrator would be coining them.

• Nick begins the book by rhapsodizing about Amy’s head, which is “Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil”
• He says of Amy and his mother: “Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after – ‘And what did she mean by …,’ – as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t on offer.”
• He mentions “an Eisenhower-era linoleum floor, the edges turned up like burnt toast”

Is it entirely believable that Nick would come up with such unique similes? He is, after all, a writer. Granted, he’s a retired “Entertainment Weekly” writer, but so is Flynn. If she can come up with these, so could he.

Last time, I praised how different their voices are, well here’s another example: Her similes aren’t as good. She was, after all, a personality quiz author, not a reviewer. She says things like “Like some sort of feral love jackal”. One of her better attempts is “adopted orphan smile”, but then she brags about how good it is, ruining the goodwill that she built up.

(The book also does a great job with unique adjectives, like “thick afternoon naps” and “fish-white feet”)

Rulebook Casefile: Different POVs with Different Voices in “Gone Girl”

I talked last time about how I’m not a fan of including lots of third-person POV characters, so it’ll be no surprise that I’m not generally a fan of multiple first-person POVs. You know that I’ve always been a fan of having one hero for the audience to totally bond with.

If Suzy is wondering what’s going on in Bob’s head, then I want to stay with Suzy and bond with her as she tries to figure Bob out, I don’t want to briefly jump into Bob’s head to find out what Suzy will never know.

But if you have to do it, “Gone Girl” is a beautiful example of a multiple first-person POV novel done right:

• It has a reason to exist: This is the story of a poisonous marriage, viewed though two radically different points of view with radically different facts. Either POV would be insufficient to tell this story. It’s richer for having both. This isn’t a case where we have the hero and an additional POV, the two are given equal weight. The interplay of the two POVs is more interesting than either on its own.
• It’s careful to let us know exactly where we are at all times, beginning each chapter with the name of the narrator and where we are in the timeline.
• It actually gives Nick and Amy genuinely different voices. The biggest risk in having multiple POVs is that the reader won’t be reading closely and miss the jump entirely. There’s no risk of that here. After six pages of his bitter, wistful, depressed, regretful, self-lacerating voice, looking back on their wreckage of a relationship, we jump to her chirpy, manic, needy, optimistic voice, looking forward to the sure-to-be-great relationship to come. Her first line is something he would never say “Tra and la!” 
• And yet both voices are sympathetic, albeit in very different ways. We bond with both, to a certain extent, though we also look down on each (he for being a loser, her for being naïve)

Next we’ll talk about how even their similes are different...

Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Value of Rowling’s Omniscient Third Person

It’s my opinion that readers crave as few points of view as possible. I prefer either first person or third person that’s strictly limited to one head. But writers love to skip from head to head, because it’s more convenient to tell a story that way, and Rowling is no exception. The first chapter begins in Mr. Dursley’s POV, then switches to McGonagall’s, then to Dumbledore, and only in Chapter 2 do we switch to Harry, where we will remain for most of the rest of the book.

But there’s also a fourth POV here, and it’s the one that makes all the others work: Rowling’s own. The very first time we leave a POV, as Mr. Dursley goes to sleep, on our way out the window to McGonagall, we pause for a one sentence paragraph where Rowling inserts her own voice.

The POV isn’t just idly wandering from one character to the next, our goddess is plucking it away from one character, commenting directly to us about what a fool he is, and then safely setting us back down in the POV of McGonagall.

In the above excerpt, “How very wrong he was,” makes all the difference. It establishes that we have omniscient third-person narration, and that our omniscient third-person narrator might sometimes, very rarely, have something to say directly to us. This isn’t Harry’s book, it’s J. K. Rowling’s, and she’s going to show some character herself.

Even before this, Mr. Dursley’s thoughts aren’t necessarily summarized in the way he would summarize his own thoughts, but rather in the way that Rowling would:

• Mr. Dursley was enraged to see that a couple of them weren’t young at all; why, that man had to be older than he was, and wearing an emerald-green cloak!

That “why” is key. It diminishes Mr. Dursley. It’s also a subtle hint that we’re reading a children’s book, despite the adult characters. It sounds like the narrative voice of a picture book. Even when narrating our POV character’s thoughts, Rowling’s omniscient narration is making itself heard.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: To Prologue or Not to Prologue?

Should you start your book with a prologue or chapter one? Declaring your opening pages to be a prologue can have its uses.

When we begin to read a book, we’re desperate for a hero. We want to find one character we can believe in, care about, and invest in, then settle in comfortably to that character’s POV as we launch into this book. But sometimes it’s not convenient to begin your book that way. Sometimes you have a good reason to begin your book away from your hero’s POV.

Maybe you want to begin with a scene featuring the eventual villain, or one of the victims of that villain. Maybe you want to begin in the past before your hero had his or her current personality.  In each of those cases, you have a problem: You’re not presenting the audience with what they want, a fully-realized hero in the story’s modern-day to start the story with. The danger is that they’ll try to bond with whatever character you’re giving them, only to find them woefully insufficient, because of course this isn’t your hero yet.

One solution is to tip off your audience that this isn’t your hero yet by declaring those opening pages to be a prologue, not chapter one. This is a way to buy yourself some time. You’re assuring your reader: Don’t be alarmed if you can’t find anybody to care about yet, the book hasn’t really begun yet, this is just to establish plot or tone or whatever. Character will have to wait.

This way, you can maybe get a few more pages out of your gatekeeper as well.You can’t put it down after five pages if you haven’t even gotten to chapter one yet! You at least have to give me that long.

So all of these are reasons that the opening pages of Harry Potter book 1 could have been identified as a prologue. We begin in the POV of Mr. Dursley, of all people, for five pages, then jump briefly to a cat, then Dumbledore, then meet our hero as a baby. It’s only in the next chapter that we’ll jump ahead ten years and the real narrative begins.

But Rowling calls her opening Chapter One. Is it possible that this hurt her with the twelve publishers that rejected her? Would they have kept reading longer if they had been reassured that Mr. Dursley wasn’t going to be the hero of the book?

Would there have been any downside to declaring it to be a prologue? Would it seem too fussy? Would kids be less likely to pick it up if it didn’t seem like it would get going right away? Or is there some fear that they would simply skip those pages?

Ultimately, the book sold, and caught on like wildfire, and now it’s the first book that many kids read on their own, so clearly it did something right. Maybe we should do away with prologues altogether? What do you think: Is this intro better off as a prologue or chapter one?

Rulebook Casefile: Harry Potter Goes From Hero to Zero

It’s the greatest paradox of writing: Readers want heroes to be underdogs, but they don’t want them to be losers. They don’t want your main character to actually go from being zero to hero: they want him or her to start out with skills and admirable characteristics that will carry him or her though the story.

But Harry Potter does come off as sort of a loser in the first chapter of his first book:

• Harry had always been small and skinny for his age. He looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was because all he had to wear were old clothes of Dudley’s, and Dudley was about four times bigger than he was. Harry had a thin face, knobbly knees, black hair, and bright green eyes. He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose.

Harry then takes a lot of abuse, without much pushback.  He’s really downtrodden.  Rowling is totally playing up the underdog aspect. We fear for him more than we cheer for him.

Why does this work? Because of the first chapter, when we saw Harry at age 1, having defeated the scariest wizard of all time. We don’t find out until book 4 (in a moment that I think should have gotten more emphasis) that Harry did not defeat Voldemort due to any inherent powers, but simply because of a spell his mom cast to bounce Voldemort’s spell off the baby. Until that reveal, we assume that Harry has some sort of special superpower that leaves all the greatest wizards in his world in awe. He’s the great hero they were all waiting for, right from the start.

So we’re more willing to put up with loserish qualities in Harry when we meet him again at age 11. He’s allowed to go from zero to hero, because he’s already gone from hero to zero. He’s secretly the ultimate bad-ass, so it’s ironic that he seems so weak now. If we didn’t know better, and we had the sense that he really was simply a weakling, we might be put off and quit reading.