There are times, as storytellers, when we can be so bull-headed about what we want to express, that we end up pushing an agenda rather than telling a story. We create “good guys and bad guys,” and in so doing, our writing becomes general, turgid, boring. This may seem obvious, but at times it can be subtle and insidious. I believe that our challenge in “writing the truth” is to be vigilantly open to the fact that we never know the whole story. In fact, we are always simply channels for the stories that wants to be told through us.
As soon as you create good guys and bad guys, you have taken a position, which is not your job. You cannot afford to make value judgments. Story is not about making moral judgments, though some will tell you it is. It is about cause and effect.
This means, that on some level, you must always be willing to let your story collapse in order for your characters to live. This is where storytelling becomes an act of faith. You are often writing against the direction you think your story is heading.
For example, let’s say I’m writing a romantic comedy. It’s about a boy who meets a girl, loses her, then gets her back. I need to be watchful that when he loses her, he has genuinely lost her in some real and fundamental way. It is not enough for the couple to simply have a disagreement or misunderstanding, and then later, reunite. You want to thoroughly investigate his experience of losing her. It is only in the losing that he can experience a surrender of his old identity. In this way, you create a space for him to have a shift in perception.
The truth is far more complex and interesting than your idea of the story. It is in the nuance, the specificity, that the story gets juicy. The more willing you are to recognize that your protagonist and antagonist both want the same thing, the more human they become. Often, the only thing separating your protagonist from your antagonist is that the protagonist is willing to surrender their old identity.
True writers are humble (at least in relation to their writing). Storytelling is an act of humility. Your stories are simply a by-product of your new understanding, a document of how you got from there to here. Story asks everything of you for a reason. If it didn’t, you would never surrender. The tendency to push an agenda exists to the extent that you are unwilling to surrender. Frankly, there are many noted writers who seem to get away with this. Their facility with language, their powers of persuasion often trump any universal truth.
Perhaps it is expecting too much to speak of being a channel for our stories. When you are a channel, meaning when you are willing to tap into something universal, you come into contact with your “basic goodness.” Now, perhaps this is just me forcing my own agenda, but I believe that humanity’s resting state is love, and that conflict is born out of fear. I believe it is our challenge in every story to define love. I mean this in terms of approaching life from a spirit of evolution. Love is the ultimate object of subjectivity, it has a million different meanings. It is the ultimate mystery, and lies at the heart of every story. When we relegate characters to certain camps, we deny that mystery. In fact, we play God, not allowing for the truth of the world to unfold for us.
Why do some stories have an ineffable “alive” quality, while others do not?
Great storytelling gives us a glimpse into the true nature of things. At the heart of all great writing is a surrendered quality, an acceptance of the way things are, as if the writer had lost touch with the civilized world and was taking dictation from another plane. Great writing transcends knowledge. It enters the realm of the imagination, where you risk all that you know, so that a new order can be born.
Learn more about marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of structure in The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, or The 90-Day Screenplay workshops.
Writing the Reluctant Protagonist