Meryl Streep’s One True Thing

Have you ever seen Inside the Actors’ Studio? It was a long running show which interviewed actors about their craft. They have interviewed some greats, one of whom was Meryl Streep.

Is there anything the woman can’t do? She does drama to perfection, sings at performance level, and even though I was a bit doubtful whether she could move into comedy, was killer in The Devil Wears Prada.

Streep’s one true thing

To add insult to injury, she is exceptionally articulate about her craft. James Lipton, the host, asked how she could play unsympathetic characters, specifically an Australian woman in A Cry in the Dark, who was accused of murdering her infant daughter. In this biographical film, the woman was a Seventh Day Adventist who believed that showing emotion was inappropriate as it questioned God’s plan for her. This stoicism was read as unfeeling by the Australian public which turned against her. Thus, Streep had to play a seemingly cold and insensitive character.

Streep replied that when she prepared for a role, she tried to find the ‘one true thing’ which was true about herself and about the character. Once she found that one important thing, she could consult this one true thing within herself when she was making choices for her character. If it felt right for Meryl’s one true thing, it was also right for the character.

I think this is pretty damn brilliant and writers can take a leaf out of her book. Finding one true thing in our characters.

Applying one true thing

So, I have tried it with my writing. What I have found is that there is a spot in the middle of my chest, don’t ask me why, where that connection is made between me and my character. If I really get her desperation, why he would take such a big risk, who she is behind closed doors, then I can write from that spot because I feel what the character is feeling, even if the circumstances which I associate with the feeling might be different from the character’s.

If I can take into me the thing that is true for the character which is also true for me, I can write from that spot in the middle of my chest which connects me with the character in a deeper way than conventional methods.

For more, go to the next post, More on One True Thing.

August 27, 2022August 27, 2022

Reality—‘This is How it Really Happened’–is No Defense

reality

Reality—‘This is How it Really Happened’–is No Defense

Sometimes a writer will be told that whatever scenario he’s written doesn’t work to which he may indignantly reply, “But that’s how it happened!” and assume that reality is an acceptable defense.

News. It is not.

As we discussed in a previous post, Fiction is Not Life, story-telling has requirements which can be, and often are, quite different from real life. Without realizing it, readers expect the conventions of fiction to be followed even if they are unaware that they exist.

Why reality is not an adequate defense

If the world were fair, you’d just have to record your searing experiences and that intensity would be communicated to the reader. Sometimes that happens but sometimes it doesn’t.

Whether autobiography or memoir or even just a thinly disguised piece of reality in your fiction, you can’t possibly record every moment even if you could remember them. Bowel movements and grocery shopping are not usually the stuff of drama. Therefore, as a writer, you are constantly making choices of what to include, what to emphasize, what to ignore. It is in these choices that things can go off the rails.

An example

Say you want to write about the death of a friend in a car accident. There are any number of things you could choose to include in the account:

The road conditions
The condition of the car
The police report
The bystanders’ reactions
The time of day
The make of the car
The driving experience of the friend
Others in the car
The conversation in the car before the accident
The background to the friend’s erratic driving
How you met the friend
Your reaction to the news of his death
The condition of the car after the accident
His relatives’ reactions

I’ll quit now but I wasn’t even trying hard to generate the list. The list could probably go on for quite a while. You have to make choices of what to include in your story.

How do I make reality compelling?

Say you intend to focus on your reaction to the death. Then it’s possible that the first part of the list will not help you hone in on your story and will either bore your reader or make it feel more mechanical than you intend.

You need to pick the elements of the event which are dramatically interesting even, or perhaps especially, in a piece that is close to your heart. If you don’t, you will not be able to communicate its importance. As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, readers unconsciously expect writing to follow the conventions of fiction and are kicked out of the continuous dream if you don’t.

So use auto-biographical material by all means, but make sure you pick those elements of the event or events which are both dramatically interesting and which support your intent.

And quit saying, “But this is how it really happened!”

August 21, 2022August 21, 2022

Fiction is Not Life

life

Fiction is Not Life

I know you know this but, in fact, good fiction makes you forget. Maybe it’s even its job to do so, to make you feel as if it is real life. That’s great for a reader but as a writer, you need to know the underlying conventions of fiction.

How fiction differs from real life

Lives have to be in crisis.

In real life, we want things to go our way. Disasters are, well, disasters and disruptive to our preferred way of living.

In fiction, a story without obstacles to overcome and crises to transcend— first, isn’t a story, and second, is boring.

The story has to be credible.

In real life, all kinds of incredible things happen. I remember watching a documentary where a Jewish woman escaped the death camps with the help of a Nazi responsible for sending people to them; she married an SS officer who knew she was Jewish; and was shunned by other Jews after the war because she had not gone to a concentration camp. Would anybody believe that if you put it in fiction?

In fiction, readers are loath to believe the inherently unbelievable. It strains their credulity (and breaks the continuous dream) if too many coincidences, strokes of luck, or people acting out of character occur. Even though all of these can happen in real life.

Readers expect a resolution.

In real life, life is messy. You’ll never know whose daughter Becky really is; or what possessed your best friend to marry the jerk. We accept that we’re not always going to know the answer or how things turn out.

In fiction, a narrative without a resolution is disconcerting for the reader. Sebastian Faulks (whose novel Engleby I adored) wrote A Week in December with a would-be suicide bomber character. Presumably I missed some deeper meaning but the novel felt unresolved for me because I didn’t understand why the character decided against bombing. Generally, fiction requires a kind of closure often not available nor possible in real life.

An ordered progression is necessary.

In real life, our conversations and arguments go all over the place. We repeat and diverge, recap and wander. The conversation can zig and zag but still fully engage.

In fiction, dialog which bounces around like real conversation is usually confusing and ultimately boring for the reader. Without realizing it, the reader expects that arguments will build on each other to some kind of conclusion.

Character’s actions have to be consistent.

In real life, we know people can be petty one moment and generous the next; caring one and callous the next. Nobody is totally predictable.

In fiction, a character which has opposing traits will kick the reader out. Hey, I thought he was selfish—what’s with sacrificing himself? Characters who aren’t consistent can be portrayed but you’d better be prepared to explain why.

See? The conventions of fiction are actually quite different from real life but we must adhere to them to give the reader the feeling of real life. Confusing, no?

July 8, 2022July 8, 2022

Showing Show and Tell

In another post on The Life of Pi, I discussed how the director of that movie gave us a powerful example of the power of show. Let’s look at the uses and effects of ‘show’ and ‘tell.’

‘Tell’ has its uses

Say you are inclined to write something like this:

He listened intently to the orders. He felt his throat tighten at the thought of what Serena told him to do. It was immoral and probably illegal. But he didn’t feel as if he had a choice. He felt as if the walls were closing in.

So, gets across the point that he (let’s call him Matthew) is very unhappy. Efficient way to do it. ‘Tell’ is useful if you need to establish some not very important point in the narrative but which the reader must nevertheless know. But this scene doesn’t seem to be one of these.

The power of show

Let’s rewrite the passage using more ‘show.’

“I can’t do that!” Matthew protested. “Come on, Serena, that’s practically, practically…”

“What, Matthew?” Serena turned the corners of her mouth up but her eyes didn’t change. “Illegal, immoral, unethical, all of the above?”

“I can’t, Serena, I just can’t.” He felt as if the walls were closing in on him.

Serena flipped away his protest. “And yet, you don’t really have a choice, do you?”

See, ‘show’ gives you a much better idea of who the characters are and how they interact. ‘Tell’ is like a semi-transparent screen you put in front of an action you’re observing. You can see but it’s not sharp and clear. ‘Show’ is the screen removed, where you are directly observing what’s going on. And with ‘show,’ the reader can come to his own conclusions about the characters rather than the writer telling how to feel about them.

This distinction is as important in a memoir as it is in fiction. You don’t want to tell your readers what happened; you want them to experience it—‘show’ territory.

Doesn’t ‘show’ take longer?

Yes, it often takes more words for ‘show’ than ‘tell.’ So what? Effectiveness, not efficiency, is what we are after here. The objective for the reader is to live your story not get to its end in record time.

When you want to focus the reader’s attention on particular aspects of the character’s life, these are good candidates for ‘show.’ When you want to glide over some things because they’re not germane to your main point but need to be there for the narrative to hang together, ‘tell’ might be useful.

A rule of thumb: If the point you want to establish is important (Sheila really does hate her brother; Matthew is a wimp; Serena has issues), dramatizing it by using ‘show’ is probably a good bet.

June 24, 2022June 24, 2022

Show Versus Tell in the Movie, The Life of Pi

Show Versus Tell in the Movie, The Life of Pi

Have you seen the movie ‘Life of Pi’? Not the book, the movie. The book, what can I say? Loved the beginning where the protagonist is sampling different religions, loved the end where (spoiler alert!) it’s not clear which of the stories he tells is true. But the middle? Honestly, a boy—Pi— in a boat with a tiger. For a long time.

I heard somewhere it called magic realism but I guess I’m just not refined enough to get it. To me, it was a boy in a boat with a tiger. For a long time.

So, I was a bit reluctant to see the movie given the boy-boat-tiger thing. However, Ang Lee is such a good director and he was getting a lot of praise for the movie, so I allowed myself to be coerced into seeing it. And, as anticipated, the whole boy on tiger thing played prominently even though Ang Lee did an amazing job with the visuals.

But it wasn’t that which struck me as the master stroke.

Two possible endings in the Life of Pi

In the last scenes, Pi is relating his story to the insurers of the boat. They don’t believe the tiger thing, so to satisfy them, he makes up a story about he, his mother and the ship’s cook surviving in the boat (sans tiger). He says the cook killed his mother and then died himself. The insurers go away with a story they can accept.

But that’s not the brilliant part. The brilliant part is how that last scene is shot. Gérard Depardieu, the famous French actor, appears for about a minute at the beginning of the film as the cook being nasty to the boy’s mother on board before the disaster. That’s all we see of him.

Which was odd. Would Depardieu sign on for a minute on screen? I don’t think any famous actor would accept what is essentially a bit part. And then it hit me.

The power of show over tell

I would bet money Ang Lee (well, a small amount) originally filmed an entire alternate story with featured Depardieu’s character of the cook prominently. But when it came to the editing, he realized that if he showed (SHOW) the scenes with the cook on the boat, it would become too real and compete with the story which we have just spent two hours watching. So, instead, he has Pi just tell (TELL) the story. And because we don’t see the alternate story, as viewers, we believe the one we were shown.

This is a wonderful example of the power of ‘show’. When you tell something, as in the alternate story, it has some power but when you show it, as in the story in the movie, it is the reality we buy.

This is why writing teachers harp so much on ‘show’ versus ‘tell.’ ‘Tell’ gives you one effect and ‘show’ another. In the post called Showing Show and Tell, I’ll walk you through an example how to use the power of show in your writing.