Where Am I?

I’ve been thinking a lot, of late, about being lost. 

About how it’s a necessary part of any Story.  But also, I’m sorry to say, of the process of writing one. 

If you had come to one of my workshops a few years ago, or sent me your book for a structural edit, I might have eagerly plied you with systems, structures, templates, with which to assist your shaping of the next draft. And these systems, these templates that have been created over hundreds of years by master story-workers are wonderful. And useful and wise, and they have taught me so much about what binds a story, how it is propelled and sustained, what is needed in a story to compel and satisfy and move a reader.  I still use many of these different ways of looking at structure in my group and editing work, and will always do so. 

But I’ve come to understand that a certain amount of just not-knowing, what happens next or where the hell this story is going – as painful as that can be – is often the key to unlocking the story you were meant to write. 

Or, to put it in the words of American screenwriter Craig Mazin, in Episode 403 of his and John August’s excellent podcast, Scriptnotes: ‘Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s something that happens because you wrote well. If you follow strict structural guidelines, in all likelihood you will write a very well-structured bad script.’ 

I’m going to push this further with a clumsy metaphor: If writing lost and structure are the proverbial horse and cart, I think the horse (being your imagination) needs to be allowed to run free a while before it’s expected to deliver the cart (the well-designed structure). 

Oh that’s bad - I apologise. And in reality, it’s a continual back-and-forth, zoom-in, zoom-out process. A process in which you write something – a sentence, a scene, a chapter – you’re close up to it, looking, listening, being in this place and time with your characters, as lost or deluded as they might be about what they’re doing right or wrong or what’s to come, and then when you’re done, you the creator, the GOD of story, sit back and look at what you’ve made. 

And it’s then that you might want to ask yourself some questions pertaining to the things you have learned about structure, about cause and effect, about reversals and midpoints and defining moments and climaxes. But don’t get ahead of yourself. Use what you’ve learned about structure to help you imagine what might happen next, what the story needs. And then let the horse run free again. 

For me, it’s akin to the difference between what an actor does and a writer’s job. The actor receives a text in which, one hopes, all this structural design has already been thought about, connected up, agonised over, made sound by the writer. The actor’s job, therefore, and it’s a hard one to make look as easy as the best actors do, is to inhabit those words as fully in the moment as she possibly can, to know nothing more than the words she is currently saying or hearing from the other people in that scene. She just needs to be, as completely as she can, the person who within this story she’s inhabiting would say these words at this moment, because they were necessary to her. 

The writer, however, needs to do both.  She needs to think about structure, about this thing causing this thing because of this thing which made that character want this, and if that thing in Chapter 6 hadn’t happened then this wouldn’t have, and in the end the character needed to do this and believe this so that he could end up losing this and understanding this….but at the same time, the writer needs to be able to lose herself in the moment. 

Like the actor. To sit in not-knowing with her characters so that the real best answers for the story can arise out of that human lostness, from the inside out of the characters’ moment to moment desires and wounds and joys and fears, rather than from some externally imposed structural plan you’ve been taught by me in a workshop. 

Again, I stand by these structures! The ones I’ve been sharing with writers for years. But only after the fact, only to illuminate, finesse, elucidate, what you have arrived at organically. Structure should enable you or me to ask the right questions of your story, the useful ones. But not to write the story for you. 

Finally, remember that the quickest, easiest way to create empathy from a reader for a character is to have that character become lost. It doesn’t matter how much of an anti-hero they may be. Even the cruellest villain pulls at our heart-strings when we see him lose everything, when we see everything he believed to be true and dependable crumble at his feet. 

Or as Craig Mazin puts it, in that Scriptnotes episode, No, 403: So, granted, we love the lasers, we love the explosions, we love the ka-boom, and we love the sex, and we love the tears, but what we need from drama – and when I say drama I mean the drama of comedy and the drama of drama – what we need are these moments where we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost.

Being lost implies you have been forced to leave behind what you knew or believed - about life, about your story – and you don’t yet have any new knowledge or beliefs to lean on or show you the way. It’s painful. We want desperately to cling on to something old and solid, to what worked before. But losing your way is the only route to real change. In your characters’ lives, and also in your Story Work. 

So have faith. Be brave and wild.

Get lost.