While returning to his car in the Walmart parking lot, a friend of mine was struck by lightning—in the form of a thought:

“Everything is always in a state of irreconcilable difference with itself.”

Now, there’s a notion in motion! 

I like fluid propositions.  I love a good paradox.  “You can’t step in the same river twice.”  How fluid is that!  Contrarily, I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the concrete conventional wisdom that rules our lives. 

“Stick to your guns,” is classic advice.  Lies like that must be installed in our heads to protect our fragile belief systems.  We sure don’t want to hear Somerset Maugham say, “Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress upon not changing one’s mind.”  

Sticking to our beliefs protects us from the truth.  It’s an untenable situation that has given birth to Drama.  It accounts for the folly of our “human condition” rife with unguarded moments that invite such thought-bombs as:

“Everything is always in a state of irreconcilable difference with itself.”

I can’t make that thought sit still.  For that very reason, Zen monks invented koans.  You know, little mental quandaries such as, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”  A koan is meant to stop the mind, because a mind stopped sees that everything is in constant motion. 

“Everything is in a state of flux.”  

What parking lot was Heraclitus walking through when that thought struck?  (Or was it Robert Byrne, the billiards champ?)  Now, here’s the interesting thing—this observation has been co-opted by conventional wisdom.  We deploy it without thinking about it, without pausing to consider that it might pertain to us?  We trip through all the Walmarts of our lives enthusiastically blind to the nature of reality.  Flux?  Fiddle-faddle.  We are fixed entities, solid identities.  No wonder we believe that…

“It’s easier to die than change.”  (My wife was visited by that realization that while traversing the Starbucks parking lot.) 

Despite all the koans and all the lightning, we have convinced ourselves that many things are true.  And so we live uncertainly between the fluid facts of life and our protective delusions.  Every so often, however, in an unguarded moment, when an apple drops from our grocery bag or a swooping bird arrests our attention or our own reflection startles us, we think:

“In the opposite of our principles lays our truth,” or…

“All disease is constipation,” or…

“The best goal is no goal.”

It sounds absurd.  But it’s not absurd to an open mind.  “If you live without goals,” says Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits, “you’ll explore new territory. You’ll learn some unexpected things. You’ll end up in surprising places.”

An open mind sees everything as a flux.  There’s no such thing as the status quo.  Everything is always in a state of becoming a higher version of itself. 

“Everything is always in a state of irreconcilable difference with itself.”

I’m going to sit still, close my eyes and repeat that twenty times.  And hope that lightning doesn’t strike.

“If you’re interested in deepening your creative practice…then I suggest you sometimes forget about learning more.  Let go of the learning.  Unremember and unlearn. It’s not easy, but it’s worthwhile approaching your story with the eyes and ears of a child…”

To read more, click here.

This week, I’m sending you over to the website of Ramon Kubicek, a writer who’s been teaching Creative Writing for decades.  He’s saying, ‘Forget everything I’ve ever said!”

In the run-up to the launch of my eBook, “Story Structure to Die for”, I can’t think of better advice.  Whether you’re deep into a novel or journaling your way through winter…take a break!  Reclaim your “beginner’s mind”. 

Kubicek is paid to familiarize students with the fictional fact of life, but he realizes that a writer also needs freedom from the tyranny of knowledge.

To “finally say and write what you really want.”

Read Kubicek here.

Do you play “Heartspotting”? 

Just this morning, I scored big—on page 203 of “South of the Border, West of the Sun” by Haruki Murakami:

For a moment or two, my sense of self really did break down, its very outlines melting away into a thick, syrupy goo. 

There it is—protagonist hits rock bottom.  Doesn’t even know who he is, anymore.  You can’t sink lower than that.  Nothing’s going to be the same from here forward.  This scene isn’t just the heart of a story, it’s…

WHY WE READ.

Heartspotters usually have to work harder than that to find this all-important plot point.  But Murakami makes it easy:

I was drained, completely, leaving an empty shell behind.  A hollow sound reverberated through my body… For several days afterward, I couldn’t speak.  I’d open my mouth to talk, but the words would disappear…

We’re looking for the protagonist to fail at the superficial level.  What’s a story without a hero forced to go deep?  Audiences expect this moment.  We’re playing Heartspotting without being aware of it, because hearts are where stories nourish us.

Have you ever felt, “Well, that’s all the stories I need for a while.”?  No one says that.  Stories are no less a part of our lives than eating.  We are nourished by the heroics that go on at the Story Heart.  

By heroics, I don’t mean saving damsels in distress.  I mean having the courage to suffer that existential void.  We don’t know it at the time, but this is the human organizm’s Rx for growing up. 

Color returned to the world, and I no longer had the helpless feeling that I was walking on the surface of the moon… I could detect a minute shift in gravity and a gradual sloughing off of something that had clung to me.  Something inside me was severed, and disappeared.  Silently.  Forever.

In real life we don’t generally volunteer ourselves for personal annihilation, so we do it vicariously through fiction.  Instinctively, we know when a story is providing our fix, or not.  As we read novels and watch movies, we’re anticipating the story heart, and when it’s missing, we want our money back.

We all play Heartspotting, whether we know it or not.

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.

In 1939, Henry Miller traveled to Greece.  War was threatening, so he didn’t delay.  He describes his sabbatical year in a memoir called “The Colossus of Maroussi”:

“I never knew the meaning of peace until I arrived in Epidaurus.”

Miller’s description of his visit to the ancient healing site at Epidaurus, infected me like a curse.  I had to go.

“At Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat.” 

Never mind the healing temple, the amphitheatre, and the esoteric cures themselves, the approach to Epidaurus through cypress-studded hills were enough to bring out the mystic in Miller:

“I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.”

Surrender—we’re always being told that we should.  And in fact we do.  Nobody grows up without ditching their outmoded belief systems from time to time.  Life conspires against us—like that curse—to encourage it to happen.  That’s my experience, and it’s also the way fiction plays out.

While rereading “Maroussi” lately, I was struck by how Miller saw his visit to Epidaurus in heroic terms:

“Over thirty years I had wandered, as if in a labyrinth.  I had tasted every joy, every despair, but I had never known the meaning of peace.  En route I had vanquished all my enemies one by one, but the greatest enemy of all I had not even recognized—myself.”

Henry Miller is the classic protagonist.  His day-trip to Epidaurus reads like an anatomy of a descent into the heart of fiction.  His victories hollow, he is disillusioned with himself.  Unable to collude any further with the conventional wisdom that misled him, Miller lets go of his old belief systems.

This is the crisis—always painful—on which good stories turn.  Everything’s uncertain until a new order evolves, and until then…

“(It’s) a metaphysical bliss which makes things clear without being known.  No analysis can go on in this light: here the neurotic is instantly healed or goes mad.”

This is extra-strength natural healing—the curse that’s better than a blessing, the sickness that’s better than health.  But Miller insists that:

“Nature alone can do nothing.  Nature can cure only when man recognizes his place in the world.”

Knowing where we stand—this is the grace that descends upon the stalwart hero as reward for surrender.  And by surrender, Miller means giving up everything.  Hope, faith…it all has to go:

“If you cling to even the tiniest crumb, you nourish the germ which will devour you.  As for clinging to God, God long ago abandoned us in order that we might realize the joy of attaining godhood through our own efforts.”

I love Henry Miller for the way he lived his life as a hero.  Not many people live courageously enough to dissolve the borders between fiction and the facts of life.  Miller was no tourist—his travels were adventures in what it means to be human.

“Epidaurus is merely a place symbol: the real place is in the heart.”

“Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.”  

Somerset Maugham made that observation 100 years ago.  Astonishingly, here in the 21^st century, the quote still has an ironic ring to it.  Tough guy heroes with iron-clad principles still rule political debates and cheap fiction.  Hard to believe that people still buy into it.

Even writers buy into it!  Well, good luck to them, I say.  I mean, if a writer doesn’t have insight into what makes a real hero…

Fine, I guess that’s what this blog post is about:

WHAT MAKES A REAL HERO.

Brute strength—yes, very impressive, but ultimately a liability.  And, okay, some stories do end with a brute victory.  In better fiction, however, the protagonist meets a more potent force in the antagonist.  The hero comes up fatally short.  Brute force, it seems, has only served to wake the hero up to his limitations.  But the story is far from over.

It’s time for a different kind of test.

This one isn’t about forcing or doing anything.  The protagonist is utterly disillusioned with doing—that’s what brute strength has accomplished.  His actions may at times have looked heroic, but now he’s going to be a real hero, or go home.

Here’s my idea of Somerset Maugham’s real hero:

Out of options, but still desperate, the protagonist sees no way out.  The old ego clamours to retake control, but it’s been rejected.  The real hero has rejected everything about himself except the will to live.  With no new organizing principles in place, the organizm comes to a halt.

Weak men yield to the pressure of the old order to re-establish itself.  The weak cannot burn in the present moment.  They cannot “change their minds”.

The real hero commits to nothing, rather than revert to strategies that can only promise more disappointment.

Existential scientists live for such moments—the ground shifting beneath them—as simultaneously they feel terror and joy at being fully alive. 

“It’s as if you’d lived one way for a long time, and now, because of this crisis, you’re about to live in a totally different way.”  (Joseph Dispenza)

For one moment—because that’s all it takes—the hero will endure the disintegration of his beliefs, assumptions, ideas, principles, pride, interpretations, plans, projections, preferences and imaginings, and even his addictions and his attachments to pain and even joy.

There’s a hero.

There’s your change of mind.

Amen.

I was having coffee with a frustrated writer. 

She couldn’t finish anything.  Her characters seemed to have forgotten which of her many manuscripts they belonged in.  My friend had no idea what her stories were about, and consequently she was “wasting a lot of time!”

So I laid my thesis on her.

Five minutes later her eyes had brightened with the recognition of the obvious and she hurried home without so much as a thank you.  But that’s okay with me because:
a) I’m familiar with that special urgency writers feel when a literary solution strikes, and
b) I want nothing more than to see this idea out there, in practice. 

Here’s what I told her:

Visualize your story as TWO STORIES.  Two successive stories separated by a moment so profound that everything that has occurred prior to this moment is sucked into it.  This sink hole is the HEART OF YOUR STORY. 

“You mean, there’s a hole in my story and everything’s flowing into it?” she chuckled ironically, sadly, questioningly.

Exactly.  Protagonist as slave to her desire—that’s your FIRST STORY.  Of course, story number one is more or less a tragedy—it’s the law of drama. 

Author and philosopher, Muriel Barbery in her novel “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” puts it like this:

“We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have.  We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory and our doom.  Desire!  It carries us and crucifies us.”

Strategies exhausted, the protagonist is horrified by their sense of emptiness.

“Okay, then what happens?” she asks.  “In the aftermath of this failure, this nightmare.”

“Not so fast,” I said.  “The protagonist needs to burn for a moment in the hell of her own making.  All good heroes possess what poet John Keats calls “negative capability”, the ability to allow things to fall away.  Very painful.  But remember, she has no other options.  There’s no way out. 

“Now the SECOND STORY is set to begin.  Your protagonist, cleansed of self-serving strategies, sees the bigger picture.  Sees her role in the scheme of things and knows what’s necessary to bring the story to a close.

“You have TWO STORIES because your protagonist is two different people, in essence.  Between the two is the HEART OF THE STORY.  The energy in that dark heart has been driving your writing all this time.  You might as well know that.”

Anyway, my friend hurried off, as I said, leaving me wondering (again) why writing manuals don’t mention the heart of a story.  Perhaps the “story” geniuses avoid it for the same reason protagonists do.  The sinkhole has no reference points.  You can’t think your way into or out of it.  It’s a kind of death. 

So, the human organizm has developed a blind spot to protect itself.  It’s sad, but very human, this “inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.” (Muriel Barbery.)

But what’s patently obvious to any mature person is that “assumption crumbling” is crucial to our own mental development.  This vortex, this mysterious hole, this key dramatic moment in the novel or screenplay, contains everything you need in order to understand:

What your story is about

Why you’re writing it, and even…

Why readers read. 

And best of all, for the busy writer, this simple concept is going to…

SAVE a lot of TIME.

I expand on all this in the eBook I’m publishing soon.  Yours for free.  All I want is to see this idea out there, working for writers.    

You’re a writer.  So, you’re obsessed.  You’re thinking that your passion might be an affliction.  The time you’re wasting!  The money you’re not making!  The friends you’re losing!  Perhaps you need help.  Or, maybe you just need to listen to this:

I was gazing fondly at my tattoo this morning…

It’s a motif discovered on frozen mummies of Pazyryk horsemen living on the South Siberian grasslands 2500 years ago.  It’s a bighorn ram, in case that’s not self-evident. 

It struck me how much I still feel reassured by it.  No regrets at all about taking on this tattoo.

This ancient ram with its hind legs twisted upwards suggests (anthropologists say so) a passing to the other world.  It’s between worlds.  I’m a sucker for liminal zones, for border country, for that untouchable place where transformation happens. 

Sounds familiar! right?  The major turning point in any good story is often characterized by this same kind of “death”.   

I’m talking about the moment when the determined protagonist is forced into a dead end.  She’s finished with the world of conventional wisdom.  Finished!  With no apparent future.  The moment is both a crisis and a refuge.  Like the in-breath meeting the out-breath, a limbo. 

Pursue a desire (an obsession, a passion) far enough and we are cast painfully out of our known world and into this refuge.  Surprisingly, great things happen here.  People’s crusty old self-defeating habits die for want of appreciation.  In the emptiness, something arises.

Now, here’s the thing—we write to arrive at that moment. 

WE WRITE TO GET THERE!

WE READ TO GET THERE!

My Pazyryk ram—lingering between this world and the next—also takes me into that place of possibility. 

But more importantly, that’s why we write—passionately, obsessively, and without regret—so that we can tattoo the story we’re currently working on with such a deadly and at the same time positive and reassuring scene. 

That’s my story and it’s sticking to me.

 P.S.
Read my essay about Tattoos and the Heart of Fiction.
And two previous blog posts: Literary tattoos: girls, dragons, and Shangri-la, and Bringing your inside out.

Things are changing around here.

Two years ago when I launched this blog, my thoughts inclined toward young readers.  I had just published Roxy and wanted to give my audience the chance to pick the author’s brain.  Problem is, teenage girls (justifiably) don’t want to go anywhere near the brain or any other body part of a grizzled father figure. 

My early posts aimed to help teens see that “desire” launches every hero’s journey.  And, more importantly, that that desire must the thwarted.  It’s a law of dramatic writing.  The more I blogged, the more I saw how failure serves us.  It shakes us down.  Always painful, an emotional and physical dead-end will force a worthy protagonist to leave old outmoded habits behind. 

I began to truly understand how fiction works.  At the same time I saw why our appetite for books, comics, movies (and even reality TV) is insatiable.  Failure and its transforming aftermath—even vicariously experienced—provide real nourishment. 

I reflected upon the movies and books I knew best.  They all had a trajectory leading to a scene that brought the story to a standstill.  In this critical scene, the protagonist confronts the utter futility of her efforts.  There is no escaping her dilemma.

Civilizations exist, you might say, to save us from experiencing that existential void.  And yet!  No one grows up who successfully avoids that special horror.  We instinctively know this.  It’s a weird and ironic truth about the human organizm, and explains why we are drawn to these dangerously valuable experiences in fiction. 

A good writer—without even being aware of it— will sense that their story doesn’t satisfy until it turns on this fact of life.  (Readers similarly know a good story from bad.) 

So, why do even the best writing manuals have a blind spot in the vicinity of the story’s heart?  I have shelves of books that teach story mechanics, but none makes the quantum leap to describe what’s really going on at the heart of the story. 

Typically, at the story’s major crisis, the protagonist is said to “dig deeper” into his character before charging into the story’s conclusion.  But that sells us short.  Way short.  It ignores the evolutionary impulse.  It ignores that which makes us most human—our capacity to transcend ourselves and become superhuman. 

Something occurs at the heart of the story that is beyond digging and beyond strategies.  It appears to anyone who is disillusioned to the point of surrender.  Some people call it grace, a word that scares people because it can’t be called to account by conventional logic. 

So, be radical.  Go deeper.  That’s what I’m asking of writers and readers who tune into this blog.  That’s what’s changing around here.

In the eBook I’m writing—How Fiction REALLY Works—we examine story in depth.  I didn’t invent my theory, it presented itself after years of study.  My hope is that it will help writers to see their story in more graphic terms as they draft the blueprint for their story architecture. 

You’ll be able to download this eBook for nothing.  My goal is to start a meaningful conversation about fiction.  About how it nourishes us, whether we are writers or readers.   

I’ll let you know when the eBook is cooked.  Can you hold your breath until Christmas? 

I’m talking a lot lately about “being human”.  It arises out of 25 years studying stories.  Stories almost always serve our understanding of “humanity”.  Protagonists, through their struggles, point out how imperfect we are.  And yet! 

You hear it every day, the scorn heaped upon human fallibility.  Why – because once we were perfect?  What nonsense.  And yet!  This notion of perfection is a weight-bearing wall in the temple of conventional wisdom.  What a mistake.  Run for your life! 

Think about it.  We are born to be wrong so that we might learn humility and subsequently become more all-embracing.  Perfection is the antithesis! of humanness.  Religions exist to teach us the folly of perfection and the acceptance of “what is”.    

And yet!

We… a) won’t; b) can’t; or, c) don’t accept “what is”.  I vote for “can’t” because we lack the courage.  Which is why we are stopped in our tracks when someone willingly admits: “I’m only human.”

Heroes climb down off their high horse.  Intellectuals come down from their ivory tower.  Hopeless romantics come down to earth.  Flying boys crash.  My most recent protagonist, Conrad, falls into his own grave before he, too, realizes:

“I’m only human.”

It’s a confession, and for the listener, always heartwarming.  We want to wrap our arms around the confessor.  It’s a hug with a whispered subtext: “Me, too.”  But the hug may have another purpose – to keep voices down.  To keep the secret. 

Being human (I’ve discovered while writing this blog over the last two years) is largely about keeping ourselves in the dark about what it means to be human.  Admitting our failures doesn’t serve us socially, culturally or professionally.  Truth only serves us spiritually.

This is where and how and why STORIES enter the picture.  Movies, books and plays exist to serve the truth about the human organizm. 

Stories begin with the protagonist living unconsciously – her life is a lie.  By definition, a story is the journey toward the hidden truth of the character.  The truth of what it means to be human.  

Hidden, yet known to everyone.  Which explains why we open our hearts to anyone courageous enough to acknowledge:

“I’m only human.”