Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (8 page)

The Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
Olive Kitteridge
offers a simple, sublime example. Its theme is how we bear loss, and author Elizabeth Strout has said that she hopes her readers “feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance.”
¹⁰
In the following passage, a mundane moment triggers a memory that is utterly gripping because it taps into
a universal that, I’d venture to say, everyone has experienced and yet rarely found the words to express:

In that very specific memory—the dentist’s fleeting, workaday touch—an otherwise ineffable feeling of existential loneliness is made manifest, as palpable as if it had happened to us—because, as we’ll see in
chapter 4
, as far as our brain is concerned, it actually has.

By filtering her story through the thematic lens of loss and human endurance, Strout was able to pluck an otherwise random moment from Olive’s life and use it to give us insight into how Olive sees the world, and at the same time provide a visceral glimpse of the cost of being human.

If theme is one of the most powerful elements of your story, it’s also one of the most invisible. You didn’t “see” the theme anywhere in Strout’s passage, did you? It wasn’t spelled out, wasn’t referenced, but it was there, all the same. It’s like tone of voice, which often says more than the words themselves. In fact, sometimes tone says the exact opposite
of what the words are saying, as anyone who’s ever been in a long-term relationship can attest.

Your story’s tone reflects how you see your characters and helps define the world you’ve set them loose in. Tone is often how theme is conveyed, by cueing your readers to the emotional prism through which you want them to view your story—like a soundtrack in a movie. It’s another way of sharpening your focus, highlighting what your reader really needs to know.

For instance, the tone in a romance novel lets us know that, although big things will definitely go wrong, nothing genuinely damaging will ever happen, so we can safely relax into the story, secure in the knowledge that love is not only capable of saving the day, but actually will. Whereas in a novel like
What Came Before He Shot Her
, from the first sentence, the tone implies the exact opposite, though it doesn’t come right out and tell us so. Instead, tone makes us feel it, by evoking a particular mood. Tone belongs to the author; mood to the reader.

In other words, your theme begets the story’s tone, which begets the mood the reader feels. Mood is what underlies the reader’s sense of what is possible and what isn’t in the world of your story, which brings us back to the point your story is making as reflected in its theme—
reflected
being the key word. Because as crucial as theme is, it’s never stated outright; it’s always implied. Movies and books that put theme first and story second tend to break the cardinal (although often grievously misunderstood, as we’ll see in
chapter 7
) rule of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s the story’s job to show us the theme, not the theme’s job to tell us the story—especially since theme is a rotten storyteller and, when left to its own devices, is much more interested in telling us what to think than in simply presenting the evidence and letting us make up our own mind. Unchecked, theme is a bully, a know-it-all. And no one likes to be told what to do, which is why reverse psychology works so well. What this means is that the more passionate you are about making your point, the more you have to trust your story to convey
it. As Evelyn Waugh says, “All literature implies moral standards and criticisms, the less explicit the better.”
¹²

Besides, did you ever go into a bookstore saying to yourself,
What I’d really like is a book about survival and how catastrophes bring out the gumption in some and not in others?
¹³
Or
I’m dying to curl up with a good book that traces the defects of society back to the defects of human nature?
¹⁴
Or
What I’m
so
in the mood for is a book that is a metaphor for Latin America?
¹⁵
I don’t think so. Which isn’t to say that you might not leave with
Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Flies
, or
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, whose authors, when pressed, described their themes as such.

But wait: aren’t there more themes in each of those books? Probably. In fact, a simple Internet search will turn up myriad suggested themes for each title—some of which would no doubt stun, if not infuriate, their authors. But they are mostly secondary themes. What we’re talking about is the main theme—the one you, the writer, choose, rather than the ones scholars will later foist upon you so graduate students can endlessly debate them in small, earnest seminars.

To better understand how to use focus to define what your book is about—thus creating a yardstick by which to filter out all unnecessary information—let’s look at the most accessible of the three books just mentioned:
Gone with the Wind
. In the past some have dismissed
Gone with the Wind
as a trite, melodramatic potboiler, nothing more than “popular fiction.” But no one can deny its power as a spellbinding page-turner. And here’s the shocker: in 1937 it won the Pulitzer Prize. It also happened to be the bestselling novel of all time until it was surpassed in 1966 by
Valley of the Dolls
—which somehow the Pulitzer committee overlooked.

First, let’s take a good look at the theme of
Gone with the Wind
according to author Margaret Mitchell in an interview with her publisher in 1936:

As Scarlett fights, schemes, manipulates, struggles, and ultimately survives against all odds, the key ingredient is
gumption
. Fair enough. But is that the novel’s main thematic focus? Does it drive Scarlett’s reaction as calamity after calamity befall her? Is it the lens through which we watch the tale unfold? The secret ingredient that holds us fast, whether we can define it or not? It is.

What keeps us reading is the knowledge that Scarlett’s headstrong will, her guts, her nerve—her gumption—is stronger than her need to conform to society’s dictates. But we quickly learn that, as potent as her untempered gumption is, it’s also capable of completely blinding her to what is in her best interest—which, as we’ll soon see, is where her internal issue lies. We know what would make her the happiest. And we realize pretty quickly that chances are it’s the last thing she’ll do. Which raises the question:
What will she do instead? Will she ever wake up and realize what she truly wants?
And that’s what keeps us reading.

But what about the other themes that run through the novel—for instance, the nature of love, the constraints of class structure, and of course, nineteenth century society’s tightly corseted gender roles? Couldn’t any one of them be the central theme? Good question. Here’s
the litmus test:
the central theme must provide a point of view precise enough to give us specific insight into the protagonist and her internal issue, yet be broad enough to take into account everything that happens
(again: the plot). Let’s see what happens when I try to sum up
Gone with the Wind
with these other contenders. First, the nature of love:

It’s not a bad description—if the book were solely a romance, with everything else merely “setting.” But given the novel’s scope, it’s much too limiting.

Well, then, what about the way Scarlett disregards social norms?

This one isn’t bad either. That is, if you go in for the general. What societal tide, exactly? Buck it, how? Without any specifics, it’s hard to get a real picture of … much of anything. Okay, what about class structure?

Sounds like nonfiction, doesn’t it? And since nonfiction sells, and there are millions of Civil War buffs, this could be a bestseller—that is, until they realize it’s really a steamy romance about a gutsy woman who ruthlessly bucks the societal tide. Of course, by then even the staunchest history buff might keep mum, too busy hoping against hope that Scarlett wakes the hell up and realizes that Rhett is the man for her before it’s too damn late.

So, although this isn’t to say that my descriptions wouldn’t entice some readers, there is nothing in them that suggests a sprawling, steamy epic, and
Gone with the Wind
is nothing if not that. But when I begin with gumption—the notion Mitchell used as her defining theme—it’s another story:

Aha! While my description of
Gone with the Wind
might not be there yet, we’ve hit on something well worth mentioning. One way to help identify a story’s defining theme is to ask yourself: is it possible to filter the story’s other themes through it? In
Gone with the Wind
, Scarlett’s gumption came first, so—for better or worse—it affects everything else: her love life, her refusal to be constrained by the mores of the day, and her insatiable need to take action when she doesn’t get what she wants. Take action? Ah yes, the plot.

As we know, it’s the plot that puts the protagonist through his paces, presenting increasingly difficult obstacles that must be overcome if he’s to get within grabbing distance of the brass ring.

But the plot’s goal isn’t simply to find out whether he snags that brass ring or not; rather, it’s to force him to confront the internal issue that’s keeping him from it in the first place. This issue is sometimes called the protagonist’s “fatal flaw,” and whether a deep-rooted fear, a stubborn misperception, or a dubious character trait, it’s what he’s been battling throughout and what he must finally overcome to have a clear shot at the last remaining obstacle. Ironically, once he overcomes it, he often realizes true success is vastly different from what, up to that very
second, he thought it was. This is frequently the case in romantic comedies and is usually the moment when the big lug finally realizes that the beautiful, stuck-up, rich, thin girl he’s been hell-bent on winning since the opening credits isn’t
nearly
as loveable as the cute, cuddly, beautiful, thin middle-class girl next door.

Not so with Scarlett.

Scarlett’s fatal flaw is self-absorption, which when harnessed to her unstoppable gumption, makes her vulnerable in a way she cannot see. But we can. And so we’re rooting for her not only to survive, but also to gain enough self-awareness to keep herself from throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Does she? Almost, but she’s a day late and a dollar short. Which is why when the book ends, unlike Rhett, we do give a damn.

But wait; it still feels like something’s missing in our description of the novel. Sure, fatal flaw or not, Scarlett wants to survive. But don’t we all? Indeed we do, which makes survival, in and of itself, generic—one of those abstract universals. In other words, the same would be true of everyone, so it doesn’t tell us a thing about Scarlett herself and adds nothing to the story. The question is:
What does survival mean to Scarlett?
Plot-wise (that is, on the corporeal plane where the action unfolds) this translates to:
What does Scarlett need in order to feel she’s survived what life has thrown at her?
The answer is her family’s plantation, Tara. Meaning,
land
. As her father tells her early on, “Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.…” Land is what ties you to your past and makes you who you are. Without it, you are nothing. This becomes Scarlett’s benchmark, the thing that she’s sure will prove she’s survived.