Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (28 page)
Authors: Lisa Cron
Have you ever suspected that maybe, just maybe, in some small, relatively inconsequential way, you might be just a tiny bit of a sadist? Good. Because as much as you love your protagonist, your goal is to craft a plot that forces her to confront head-on just about everything she’s spent her entire life avoiding. You have to make sure the harder she tries, the harder it gets. Her good deeds will rarely go unpunished. Sure, every now and then it’ll seem like everything’s okay, but that’s only because you’re setting her up for an even bigger fall. You want her to relax and let her guard down a little, the better to wallop her when she least expects it. You never want to give her the benefit of the doubt, regardless of how much you feel she’s earned it. Because if you do, the one thing she won’t earn is her status as a hero.
The irony is, you aren’t being a sadist at all. You’re doing it for her own good, because you want her to, as they used to say back in elementary school, live up to her true potential. For that she needs your unflinching help. Sure, everyone says they want to be the best they can be—tomorrow or the next day, you know, when the time is right.
Hooey
. There’s no right time; there’s only now. And right now, your job is to see that circumstances beyond your protagonist’s control fling her out of her easy chair and into the fray. A story is an escalating dare, and its goal is to make sure your protagonist is worthy of her goal. This means that, as difficult as it may be, when it comes to the care and feeding of your protagonist, you have to be mean to her. Hold her soles to the fire, even when she starts to squirm. Even after she cries, “Uncle!” After all, the last thing you want is a hero who is all hat and no cattle.
But wait
, you may be thinking,
that’s just true of commercial fiction, isn’t it?
Commercial fiction, they say, is plot driven, so lots of stuff has to happen, and it has to build and have consequences. Literary novels don’t really need something as contrived and surface as an actual plot, since they’re character driven. Slice of life and all that. Right?
Actually, wrong. Very wrong, in fact.
MYTH: Literary Novels Are Character Driven, So They Don’t Need a Plot
REALITY: A Literary Novel Has Just As Much Plot As a Mass Market Potboiler, If Not More
Since serious literature is less prone to “big” events than commercial fiction is, it is actually
more
in need of a well-constructed plot than anything Jackie Collins ever dreamed of. In literary fiction the plot must be far more layered, intricate, and finely woven in order to illuminate subtler and more nuanced themes. Character-driven novels rely a lot less on sinking ships, falling meteors, and tidal waves, and a lot more on a missed gesture, a quick nod, a moment’s hesitation—which in the hands of a great writer can feel more earth shattering than a nine-point earthquake. But make no mistake: literary fiction still revolves around an escalating series of challenges that the protagonist must brave, because no matter how keenly honed the protagonist, he still has to want something real bad. And if that desire doesn’t put him to the test—yes, just as in a potboiler, it’s baptism by fire—then he, and the narrative he inhabits, will remain flat and uninvolving. Remember: a story revolves around events that force the protagonist to come to grips with a difficult inner issue—which, ironically, is something literary novels are far more geared to convey. So don’t fall prey to this tired old saw; instead, kick it to the curb—poetically, if you must.
Sullivan’s Travels—
The Evolution of a Bumpy Night
Okay, we’ve admitted that yes, no matter how much we love our protagonist, if he wants to be the center of attention in an actual story, he’s going to be in for a bumpy night. How bumpy? At first, not very. In
the beginning the protagonist’s quest tends to look easy—to him, that is. It has to. Because just like in life, if he
knew
the buckets of blood, sweat, and tears his hard-won triumph would require, he probably wouldn’t even get out of bed. Luckily neither we, nor our protagonist, ever know how hard it’s going to be. Take, for instance, John L. Sullivan, the privileged young film director and protagonist of Preston Sturges’s classic 1941 film
Sullivan’s Travels
. Tired of directing successful yet meaningless pieces of fluff—and you only have to hear the title of his latest film,
Hey-Hey in the Hayloft
, to get the picture—Sully wants to direct a serious drama. “I want this to be a picture of dignity … a true canvas of the suffering of humanity,” he says, brushing off his worried producer’s hopeful question, “
But with a little sex in it
?”
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When it’s pointed out to Sully that he has no actual experience in suffering of any kind, he instantly agrees, but instead of giving up, he decides there’s a simple solution. He’ll suffer. How hard can it be? So he goes to the wardrobe department, picks out sufficiently raggedy clothes (which he dons with his butler’s help), then hitchhikes out of town with a dime in his pocket. But rather than suffering, he experiences only mild annoyance at the hands of a middle-aged man-crazy widow and soon finds himself back in Hollywood.
Realizing this suffering business isn’t as easy as poor people make it seem, he sets out again. But the studio, now worried that he might actually find the trouble he’s so determined to get into, insists that a large mobile home chock full of “babysitters” follows him—just in case. This time the only thing he suffers is fools. When this doesn’t work, Sully balks and ups the ante, hitting the road again, at last riding the rails with actual hobos. Now he sees genuine suffering and devastating poverty. He sleeps on the floor; he goes hungry. But there’s a big difference between being poor and being broke, especially when back home, you’re rich. Strike three. This time his plan doesn’t work because he’s too uncomfortable to stay uncomfortable long enough to get the hang of it.
Now Sully really is ready to throw in the towel, return to Hollywood, and sort things out. Everything he tried backfired, so what’s
the use? Besides, he’s begun to suspect that there’s something sordid about being a voyeur at the table of human suffering. It feels too much like tempting fate. And in the-beware-of-what-you-wish-for category, that’s exactly when life steps in and raises the stakes, big time. A hobo steals Sully’s shoes—one of which has a studio ID card sewn into the sole—and is pulverized by a railroad train. The cops, finding the ID card, announce that Sully is dead.
However, the actual Sully has been beaten and robbed of the five-dollar bills he’d been giving out to the hobos before returning to Hollywood. In a stupor, he assaults a railroad cop and is arrested. He tells them who he is, fully expecting that to be that. But without ID, and the headlines full of the news of his death, who would believe him? No one. Sully is convicted and sent to a prison work camp where, at last, life bestows upon him the very experience he’d been seeking: human suffering without an escape clause. Goal met. Now, when he gets back to Hollywood, he’ll have the know-how to make a picture about genuine human suffering.
Except the lesson he ultimately learns is the exact opposite of what he’d expected. Because now he knows firsthand that the last thing suffering people want to watch is more people suffering. What they want is a
break
from suffering. They want to laugh, and for a moment
forget
about everything that’s wrong in their lives. They want to watch movies like
Hey-Hey in the Hayloft
and feel how wonderfully silly life can be.
And so, in the end, because everything that could go wrong, did—and then some—Sully has the experience that a perfect story bestows upon its protagonist: he returns to the place where he began and sees it with new eyes. The world didn’t change. He did.
Had writer-director Sturges shown Sully mercy, the film could have ended when Sully realized that, try as he might, there’s just no way he’d ever have a clue what it feels like to be disenfranchised. And hey, he did try pretty hard, didn’t he? So it would have been a job well done, right? Nope. Because until Sully finds himself in prison with no
way out, everything has been on his terms. And a test on your own terms is no test at all. Sturges knew this, so rather than swooping in at the eleventh hour and saving Sully from the chain gang, he stepped back and let life have a whack at him. In so doing, he actually did Sully a huge favor. As the saying goes, “No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.” Only by making sure Sully was
extremely
afflicted did Sturges give him the opportunity to become a better man.
While getting writers to punch, shoot, stab, and otherwise rough up their protagonist can be difficult, there’s something even harder to get them to do: embarrass their hero. After all, a punch is a punch; it’s physical, external—once the sting fades and the wound heals, it’s usually gone and forgotten. What’s more, physical pain is something one can keep to oneself. No one else has to know. But to embarrass someone? That’s public. Unlike physical pain, embarrassment says something about you—it means that you not only made a mistake, but that you were found out. Social pain—embarrassment, mortification, shame—lingers; the full measure of its sting tends to be felt afresh every time you think about it, even though decades may have passed.
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It’s no surprise the word
mortify
originally meant “to die,” because that’s often exactly what we want to do when we’re embarrassed.
It also tends to be the thing that best spurs growth.
So it’s a pity that embarrassment, mortification, and shame are the last thing writers want to put their protagonist through. We don’t need to read
Pygmalion
to know writers and artists have a tendency to fall for their creations. So, without meaning to, they’re always smoothing the way for him, pitching softballs—sort of like an attentive director always making sure the camera only catches the star’s “good side.” In
real life, it’s bad form to put someone in an awkward situation—worse still, to then point the finger at him and make sure everyone notices.
After all, it’s one thing to fail in private and quite another to fail on the page in plain view. Like if John graduates from a prestigious law school, then fails the bar. Twice. And he’s thinking,
Well, at least no one knows but me
. Except when he’s John F. Kennedy, Jr., and it’s the headline of the
New York Post
, which actually read: “The Hunk Flunks.” Failing in public is mortifying. But it sure triggers change, whether that means adopting an alias and moving to another state where you can pretend you’re someone else, or doing as Kennedy did and rising to the challenge. (For the record, he stuck to it, passed the bar, and went on to win all six of his cases as a prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office.)
Constantly upping the ante gets the protagonist in shape, which is crucial, since the final hurdle he’ll have to sail over will be impossibly high. Thus the more you put him through before he gets there, the better. After all, as Emily Dickinson points out, “A wounded deer leaps the highest.”
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If you want your protagonist to be up to the test when he gets to that last hurrah, you’ve got to toughen him up along the way.
Keeping in mind that your reader must know what your protagonist’s plan is before you begin to dash it, here’s a crash course on how to torture your protagonist—for his own good, naturally.
1.
Don’t let your characters admit anything they aren’t forced to
,
even
to themselves
. Remember when you were a kid, and someone was trying to get you to do something you didn’t want to do? You’d yell, “Oh yeah? Make me!” Well, in a story, when it comes to admitting anything,
ever
, that’s your characters’ mantra. No one in your story should ever divulge anything they
aren’t forced to—either by a gun to the head or, far more likely, circumstances beyond their control. Information is currency. It has to be earned. No one gives it away for free—and everything has a price. Your protagonist needs a compelling reason to admit anything. It either gains him something or keeps something bad from happening. It’s never neutral.2.
Do allow your protagonist to have secrets—but not to keep them
. We keep secrets for one reason: because we are afraid of what will happen—that is, change—if they’re divulged. But that doesn’t make it easy. A secret is “the result of a struggle between competing parties in the brain. One part of the brain wants to reveal something, and another part does not want to,” writes neuroscientist David Eagleman in
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
.
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In fact, turns out it’s unhealthy to keep a secret, both mentally and physically. According to psychologist James Pennebaker, “the act of
not
discussing or confiding the event with another may be more damaging than having experienced the event per se.”
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Thus, given how painful it can be to torture your protagonist, it’s comforting to know that ultimately forcing her to divulge her secret will actually be a kindness. You don’t want her to have a heart attack from the stress of keeping it in, do you? So no matter how fervently she may want to keep her secrets close to the vest, you can’t allow it. In fact, the more the protagonist wants to keep mum, the more the story will try to make her sing.
And one more thing: don’t keep her secret a secret from us—let the reader in. We love being insiders. Our delight comes from knowing what the protagonist is holding back and why; we revel in the tension between what she’s saying and what we know she’s really thinking.
3.
Do ensure that everything the protagonist does to remedy the situation only makes it worse
. This is otherwise known as the irony factor. Remember what we said about the decision in one scene triggering the action in the next? This is how it plays out, ever upping the stakes, forcing the protagonist to reevaluate the situation with each turn of the screw.
There are myriad ways to up the ante. For instance, April is secretly in love with Gary, so she applies for a job at his firm to get to know him better. She’s hired, and in Gary’s department, no less. But when she shows up for work all decked out in a new outfit she can’t really afford, she discovers she’s actually gotten Gary’s job. He, it turns out, has been promoted and is being transferred to the London office. (Or worse, he’s been fired, because her experience was so much stronger than his.)
Sometimes the irony stems from the fact that the plan works brilliantly and the protagonist gets
exactly
what she’s after, only to discover it’s actually the last thing she’d ever want. In which case, Gary instantly falls for April, sweeping her into his arms, murmuring that he loves her almost as much as playing
World of Warcraft
until dawn, which he’d do every night if only his mom would stop banging on the wall.4.
Do make sure everything that can go wrong does
. But don’t let your protagonist in on your agenda. Let him start out believing all he has to do is ask, and voilà! All the riches in the world will be delivered by FedEx before nine the next morning. It’s not that he’s delusional; it’s human nature. As we know, in order to conserve precious energy, anytime the brain can do less, it will,
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and we follow suit. In the beginning, no one ever spends more than the minimum effort required to solve a problem. But honestly, can you remember the last time the smallest amount of effort solved
anything
? In fact, it’s practically guaranteed to make things worse, and hopefully in ways
the protagonist never imagined. That’s why we cringe in movies when the hero breathes a sigh of relief and says, “Well, at least nothing
else
can go wrong.” Because we know that can mean only one thing: now something
really
bad is going to happen—and usually it’s something that makes everything up to that moment seem like a cakewalk.5.
Do let your characters start out risking a dollar but end up betting the farm
. Another interesting facet of the escalating trouble that follows most protagonists is that although they begin by merely betting a lowly dollar, they tend to cower, whine, and fret more about that single dollar than they do at the end, when betting the entire farm. For instance, in the 1986 John Hughes classic
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
, Ferris’s sidekick, Cameron, has never stood up to his father—a man who, according to Cam, loves his vintage Ferrari more than life itself. Which is why he never drives it. But because Cam is a wimp—he can’t stand up to anyone—he lets Ferris talk him into cutting school and taking the car out for a spin. Ferris assures Cam that afterward they’ll simply run the car in reverse to get rid of the couple of miles they’ll put on the odometer. Cam wails and moans but hasn’t the gumption to say no.
Naturally, instead of a quick spin, they end up driving around all day, racking up far more mileage than Cam ever dreamed, not to mention putting the car in constant danger of being dinged, lost, or stolen. Cam begins by whining, but as the day progresses, and he finds himself in situations that force him to toughen up, he realizes he has far more grit than he thought—
and
that keeping such a magnificent car enshrined in a glass garage rather than taking your chances driving it is, at best, foolish (as is lavishing more attention on a car you don’t drive than on your son). Thus at long last, Cam finally gets mad at his dad.
Even so, Cam is a bit panicked when at the end of the day they discover, not surprisingly, that putting a car up on blocks and wedging the gas pedal down with the transmission in reverse doesn’t, in fact, take the mileage off. Furious, Cam finally unleashes his pent-up anger by kicking the front of the car, denting it. Realizing he’s now ready to stand up to his dad, with a satisfied smile he leans on the car, accidentally knocking it off the blocks. With the engine racing, the second the tires hit the ground and gain traction the car crashes through the garage’s glass wall and sails out, plummeting into the ravine below.
Which brings us to the fabled Aesop, who said, “Men often bear little grievances with less courage than they do large misfortunes.” And so, having learned to stand up for himself throughout the day, rather than accepting Ferris’s offer to take the blame for the wrecked Ferrari, Cam digs deep and finds the courage to tell his father what happened. He is far less fearful of telling him the truth—with the car in pieces at the bottom of the hill—than he was that morning, when the worst thing he thought he’d have to confess was that they’d put ten miles on the odometer.6.
Don’t forget that there is no such thing as a free lunch—unless, of course, it’s poisoned
. This is another way of saying everything must be earned, which means that nothing can come to your protagonist easily—after all, the reader’s goal is to experience how he reacts when things go wrong. As Steven Pinker points out, stories can help us “expand the range of options in life by testing, in small increments, how closely one can approach the brink of disaster without falling over it.”
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This means the protagonist has to work for everything he gets, often in ways he didn’t anticipate (read: that are much harder than anything he would have signed on for). The only time
things come easily is when they are the opposite of what is actually best for him.
For instance, in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, out of the blue the villainous Potter summons George into his office and, in a deceptively soothing voice, offers him the opportunity of a lifetime: a job with an outsized salary—which would be an instant way out of his nickel-and-dime existence. George even considers it for a minute. But being far smarter than that simp Snow White (even the
birds
knew better than to take that apple), he knows a poisonous spider when he sees one. He is well aware that if he takes what Potter is offering him, it will cost him big time.7.
Do encourage your characters to lie
. While in real life, we don’t want people to lie to us, in a story, characters who lie are the ones who catch our interest. A provocative lie can make even the most bland character intriguing because we then think,
Hmmm, I wonder why she lied. What’s she got to hide? Maybe she’s not so bland after all
.
This, of course, means you need to let us know the character
is
in fact lying. If we don’t know it’s a lie, how can we anticipate what will happen when the truth is discovered? Because like secrets, lies, once told, must eventually be exposed. In fact, a big part of what keeps the reader turning pages is imagining the lie’s possible consequences.
Are there times when a lie doesn’t get found out? Of course. But never “just because.” Rather, the reason the lie is left unexposed must tell us something important about the characters. And sometimes the fact that the protagonist gets away with something
is
the story. For example, in Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant novel
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, the protagonist, an amoral young man named Tom Ripley, is soon a murderer. Since there are five Ripley novels in all, it’s not
giving anything away to say Tom does not, in fact, get found out—which means he lies all the way through. Thus the thrill of the novel comes from his fear that his lies
will
be exposed, juxtaposed with our anticipation of how and why they
won’t
. This is a perfect example of screenwriter Norman Krasna’s maxim “Surprise ’em with what they expect.”
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This brings us to the one person in a story who must not lie, no matter what: you, the writer. Yet writers lie all the time, often because they don’t want the reader to “figure it out” yet, as we discussed in
chapter 6
. The trouble is, the reader has implicit trust in you, so when she discovers you lied to her, she starts wondering what
else
in your story might not be true, and she begins to suspect everything.8.
Do bring in the threat of a clear, present, and escalating danger—not a vague facsimile thereof
. Everyone knows you need a force of opposition. Without one, the protagonist has nothing to play against, making it damn near impossible for him prove his worth, no matter how hard he tries. Which is why the force of opposition must be well defined—and
present
. It can’t be a nebulous threat that never really materializes, or an antagonist, no matter how potentially dastardly, who merely hovers meaningfully on the edge of the action but never actually
does
anything.
To that end, there is one accessory that no antagonist should leave home without: a ticking clock. Nothing focuses the mind—not to mention the actions of the protagonist—better than a rapidly approaching deadline. This not only keeps the protagonist on track, but keeps the writer on track as well, by constantly reminding her that as much as she’d love to send the protagonist off on a soul-searching weekend in Tuscany, unless he finds Uncle Milt’s will by midnight, all will be lost when the wrecking crew arrives at dawn.
Of course, the force of opposition doesn’t have to be a person. It can be conceptual, like the straitjacket of strict social conformity, the dehumanization of unchecked technology, or the tyranny of the letter of the law. But—and it’s a big but—it can’t
stay
conceptual because, as we know, concepts are abstract; they don’t affect us, either literally or emotionally. What
does
affect us is a concept made specific and thus concrete. This means the concept needs to be
personified
by specific characters who try to force the protagonist to bend to their will.
For instance, Ken Kesey’s novel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
is about how the demand for social conformity straitjackets those bent on following their own drummer and, if that doesn’t work, lobotomizes them. In the story, which takes place in a mental hospital, these things play out literally, spurred by an antagonist aptly named Nurse Ratched. Although she’s the one who wreaks havoc on the lives of the men in her care, she is merely the personification of the theme, which she nevertheless embodies with ruthless gusto.9.
Do make sure your villain has a good side
. We already know that, as counterintuitive as it seems, the villain has to have a good side, however fleeting and minuscule. After all, no one is all bad. Or, if they are, they rarely see themselves that way. The majority of history’s bloodthirsty, despicable despots, not to mention elected officials, thought they were doing a good thing, often in the name of God and country. But even more to the point, black-and-white characters—whether all bad or all good—are tedious, not to mention impossible to relate to. In fact, sometimes a totally good character is even more off-putting than a bad guy.
Think about it—that ruggedly handsome guy in the office who does everything right all the time, has a perfect family
life, and a desk that’s never messy—don’t you secretly wonder what’s buried in his basement? Not out of envy (probably), but because no one could really be that “perfect.” Just as the protagonist needs a flaw, so the antagonist needs a positive trait.
What’s more, a character who’s 100 percent bad isn’t likely to change, which renders him one-note. When it comes to “what you see is what you get,” what you tend to get is bored. Whereas a villain with a couple of good qualities just might be redeemable, instilling suspense. Not that your bad guy has to
be
redeemed, mind you, but both he—and the story—are far more intriguing if the possibility is open.
