Among hit comedies, the body count is staggering. The Andy Griffith Show, mother dead. The Beverly Hillbillies, mother dead. My Three Sons, dead mother. One Day at a Time, dead father. Alice, dead father. Phyllis, dead father. The Partridge Family, dead father. Family Affair, both parents dead. The Brady Bunch, two parents dead. Party of Five, parents dead.
If you were my student I’d ask: “Why is it that so many successful plots begin at the family plot?”
Because for most of us—especially among young people—our worst fear is of losing our parents. If you create a world where one or both parents have died, you’re creating characters that have survived your reader’s worst fears. Your reader will respect them from the get-go. Even though the surviving offspring might be children or teenagers, their unspoken pain and loss will cast them as adults in the reader’s mind.
Plus, from the first page, anything that happens will be survivable because the characters have already survived the worst. A dead parent bonds the surviving family in ways your reader would like to be bonded with his or her family.
To create a story in which the reader never thinks to criticize the characters, kill the mother or father before the first page. Authority: Get the Small Stuff Right
Someone once told me a secret about the stained-glass windows in cathedrals. He began by telling me how these windows served to teach scripture to the illiterate. They were the dazzling CinemaScope Cecil B. DeMille epics of their time. The summer blockbusters, these towering depictions of Jonah inside the whale, the parting of the Red Sea, the Ascension of Christ.
The trick to making a miracle believable was to place it high in the window, far from the lowly viewer. All the truly meticulous work went into creating the details people would see first, along the lower edge.
If the viewers could believe the details at their own level—the plants on the ground, the sandals, the folds in the hem of a garment—they would believe the miracle depicted higher up in the window. Manna could fall from Heaven. Halos could hover above heads and angels could fly among the clouds.
During the filming of Fight Club, I asked director David Fincher if the audience would accept the ultimate reveal that Brad Pitt’s character was imaginary. Fincher’s response was, “If they believe everything up to that point, they’ll believe the plot twist.”
With that in mind, if you were my student I’d tell you to focus on breaking down a gesture and describing it so effectively that the reader unconsciously mimics it. Not everything, but the crucial objects and actions should be unpacked. In Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” note how she lingers on the box from which the papers are drawn. She describes where it’s stored, how it was crafted, what it replaced. All of this attention lavished on a plain wooden box helps us accept the horrible purpose for it. If we believe in the box, we’ll believe the ritual murder it facilitates.
Get the smallest item wrong at your own peril…On tour for my book Beautiful You I met a young woman who said I consistently botched the details of my young female protagonist. I asked her to give an example, to tell me the most unrealistic quality I’d given Penny Harrigan—a girl from Nebraska who masturbates with the mummified finger of her dead sex coach and is erotically tormented by remote-controlled tiny robots implanted in her by the world’s richest man who seeks to genetically reengineer his long-dead wife…
“Your most unrealistic detail about Penny?” asked the reader.
Yes, I wanted to know the biggest thing I’d gotten wrong.
She thought for a moment. “That’s easy. You say her favorite ice cream is butter brickle.” She shook her head at my stupidity. “That’s an old-man flavor.”
I asked what Penny’s favorite flavor should’ve been.
“Chocolate,” she said. “Anything chocolate.”
Case closed. The smallest mistake can destroy all believability. Authority: The Authority of Truisms
The job of the creative person is to recognize and express things for others. Some haven’t fully grasped their own feelings. Others lack the skill to communicate the feeling or idea. Still others lack the courage to express it.
Whatever the case, we recognize the truth when we read it. The best writers seem to read our minds, and they nail exactly what we’ve never been able to put into words.
In her novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron wrote, “When you’re single you date other singles. And when you’re a couple you date other couples.” Reading those words, I was willing to believe anything she put on the page after that.
The same goes for Amy Hempel, who wrote, “What dogs want is for no one to ever leave.”
Amy Hempel
Fran Lebowitz once wrote, “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”
Armistead Maupin invented Mona’s Law. It states that of a great lover, a great job, and a great apartment, in life you can have one. At most you can have two of the three. But you will never, ever have all three at the same time.
Truman Capote wrote, “You can tell what a man really thinks of you by the earrings he gives you.”
Such a well-worded aphorism carries all the authority of Confucius or Oscar Wilde. A wise, intuitive observation can convey more power than all the facts in Wikipedia. Authority: Your Storytelling Context
In our world of fake news…this world in which the internet has eroded the credibility of all information…people want to know the context of a story just as much as they want to hear the story itself. Context and source are more important now than they’ve ever been.
So if you were my student, I’d ask you, “Who’s
