What Does Your Story Mean?
It’s never enough to focus on your story’s plot and action. Just look at the string of failures like “The Crow” remake, “Borderlands”, or even “Furiosa” to see that action is never enough to tell a compelling story. What makes a story great is how it changes your hero.
In the short story “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets” by Jack Finney, a man is working in his apartment when an important sheet of paper blows out the window and lands on the window ledge, eleven stories up.
Not wanting to lose all the work he had written on this paper, the man climbs on the ledge to retrieve it, and panics once he realizes he’s standing on a narrow ledge and is risking his life for a piece of paper. Now he must crawl back to his apartment window, on this narrow ledge, without falling.
By itself, “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets” is a suspenseful story because we want to know if the man survives or not, but that’s not what the story is really about.
Far too many writers start with an interesting plot and then just focus on the action of their story. That’s a sure route to mediocrity.
When creating the action of a story, go one step further and ask yourself how does the action in your story change the hero? This change must be dramatic and completely life-changing. The more dramatic, the better.
In “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets”, the man accidentally shuts his apartment window while trying to crawl back in, and must now face a choice. If he waits for help, he’ll eventually tire and fall because his wife won’t be back for several hours. If he tries to break the window, he risks falling, but it’s his only choice.
Needless to say, the man breaks the window and saves himself. Yet that’s still not what the story is about. Only after he nearly killed himself trying to retrieve a piece of paper does the man realize he’s spending too much time focusing on work while ignoring his wife, who went to the movies without him.
Because of his near death experience, the man decides his work is no longer as important to him as his relationship with his wife, and he heads out of the apartment to meet her at the movie theater. As he does so, the wind picks up that crucial sheet of paper and blows it back out the window again, but this time the man doesn’t care any more because he now cares more about spending time with his wife.
That’s what the story is really all about – that emotional moment when the hero changes for good.
Watch this ending scene from “Good Will Hunting” where the hero has decided that getting back with his girlfriend is far more important than taking a prestigious job with the government.
Every story is really about the hero facing a choice, and finally making the best choice for themselves by taking a huge risk and changing for good.
Watch this ending scene form “Lars and the Real Girl” where the hero has been terrified of getting too close to people. To cope with his fear of people, he buys a sex doll and pretends that it’s his girlfriend. In the end, he finally realizes that a fake girlfriend can never substitute for real human contact, and the movie ends with the hero finally reaching out to a girl that he likes.
So when writing your own story, start with the action that will grab an audience’s attention, but then go one step further and ask yourself how your story will change the life of your hero emotionally forever.
Because that emotional change is what every great story is really all about.
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