My eBook is late.  My apologies.  I’m simplifying the thesis.  Some days it seems ridiculously simple, and on other days blindingly obtuse, so bear with me.  Meanwhile, here’s the book’s “Introduction”.

A few years ago, nothing stood between me and my Hollywood career except Jack Lemmon and Eva Marie Saint.

My screenplay had worked its way through 4000+ scripts from around the world to emerge as one of eight finalists in the prestigious Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowships in Los Angeles.  I was ready for the Major Leagues.  Then, one of those illustrious Academy judges nixed it, saying that my Act III “devolved into melodrama.”

Ouch!  Melodrama.  Damn.  My Oscar®!  I watched it slip from my fingers and vanish into a chasm.

What is melodrama, anyway?  Yes, it’s a lousy ending.  It sucks.  But how and why?  I spent years in search of the answer to that question.  I’ve spent my entire writing life studying “story” so it won’t happen again.  And I did, I’m here to tell you that I discovered why fiction flops.  And more importantly I discovered…

How fiction works.

Back then, just starting out, what did I know?  Not much.  Only everything the writing manuals taught me.  Years went by and I began to recognize (obvious in every good movie and novel I studied) the basic building blocks of every good story.  It was so simple, yet awesome:

A story is actually 2-STORIES.

Splitting the story (at the risk of being melodramatic) was a DEATH.  Bodily death perhaps, but psychic death definitely.  In every satisfying movie I watched, characters were forced to confront the utter folly of their lives.

Protagonists, it seemed, had to “die” to the past.

I had presumed to write fiction without knowing this.  The hero’s belief systems have to suffer an 8.2 on the Richter scale.  I’m talking about total collapse.  I hadn’t understood that our personal civilizations are meant to crumble.  We are meant to fail on the way to resurrection.  It’s in the human design.

Without knowing that, without knowing how the organizm works, and loving my characters all the better for it, I had thought I could write an award-winning script.  I was destined to be found out.

The book is organized into THREE PARTS:

• First, we get friendly with the concept of a story reduced to its simplest terms—as 2-STORIES.
• Second, we go spelunking into the chasm between the two—into the HEART OF THE STORY.
• Thirdly, in light of the above, I redefine WHAT MAKES A HERO.  I mean, what really makes a hero.

This short book is intended to provide a simple but radical overview of “story”.  It’s the bird’s eye view that allowed me, finally, to know, and then to love, my characters all the way to a true (non-melodramatic) ending.

I dedicate this manifesto to Jack Lemmon and Eva Marie Saint.

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