The Woman in the Story Read online

  Mona Lisa Smile has a Wandering Woman heroine story type. Katherine Ann finds herself, for a while, at Wellesley College, a fish out of water as wandering women so often are. The dramatic question is will she stay at Wellesley? Her free-spirited thinking clashes with the conservative and reactionary values of the Wellesley culture. The different girls who are taught by her all have different heroine story types. By the end, Katherine Ann moves on.

  In A Ma Soeur! Anais is on the Path to Wholeness. She is consumed by her confusing feelings about sibling rivalry and her lowly position in the family for being the fat and ugly daughter. Her sister follows the heroine story type of Tests of Love, as her boyfriend sleeps with her and forces her to have anal sex. Anais’ fantasizes about love and escape from her family, and finally her unconscious wishes are brought to life in a terrible way.

  THEME

  I’m one of those writers who might start out thinking that I have a theme, but who finds out further down the line that another theme feels more relevant to what’s going on in the story. I don’t think you can rush your themes. I think, like cream, they rise to the top with every story document you produce in the early stages of developing your idea. Finally you click. You realize what your story is really about. If you try and find your theme too early, you can put yourself under unnecessary pressure.

  What Is a Theme?

  Well, the jury is out on this subject, and the definitions in screen-writing guides can be fairly diverse. For the purposes of writing your heroine’s story, here is mine.

  A theme is the underlying message behind your story.

  It’s pretty simple. It’s your argument, really. It’s the secret message you want to whisper in the ears of your audience so that when they leave the movie theater or the living room they think your philosophical viewpoint was their idea!

  Your theme’s main job is audience satisfaction. No one likes being preached at, so you have to bury it. It has to become a subliminal message, at least for the vast majority of your screenplay. Everyone likes a profound moment of enlightenment about the human condition, even if in a fluffy comedy. So you do have to find your theme.

  Finding Your Theme

  When I say don’t rush it, I don’t mean forget about it and wait for it to pop up. You have to do some work for the cream to rise. You have to make sure the cow is properly fed and milked in the first place! Your job is to work on your character and story in a simultaneous process in the early stages of development. Every writer develops their own processes. Here is how mine goes.

  I get an idea about my character.

  I have a strong idea of a concept and the kind of story type I think my heroine will lead.

  I do a great deal of character work, trying to find out who my heroine is. I do the exercises I’ve shared with you.

  I start to research my heroine’s world. If she’s a real character, the biographies come out. Google becomes my best friend. I trot to the local university library and surround myself in dusty tomes. I write a huge amount of notes.

  I consult the screenwriting books of my favorite gurus! A story starts to form, with secondary characters and sources of Conflict. A story type takes on a strong level of appeal.

  I sketch out story lines in the form of beat sheets. Loads of them! On the train, while I’m doing the dishes, in the shower, the creative back burner starts to swing into action. I panic when I can’t find a pen in my bag, or that scrap of cardboard I wrote something totally essential on. I become difficult to live with!

  Many versions end up in the bin. I realize my character needs to change in some areas, and some story ideas don’t make so much sense. The whole concept of what I want this story to say starts to change.

  Secondary characters and sources of Conflict become redefined.

  Then all of a sudden, I have a lightbulb moment! I suddenly realize what I really want to say.

  Whatever your process, it takes some work to find your theme. Even if you have one at the beginning, be open to change. If don’t have one, but have a vague idea, for example, love and hate in an artists’ community, then do the development work, and the real theme will come. When it does, it will be more specific and have a slant, such as “art can be destroyed by those who treasure it most.” It should feel like Robert Mckee’s Controlling Idea in Story (1999), which is a good great guide to theme. Your theme is a golden and priceless product of an alchemical process involving your unconscious, creativity, and story-telling talent. It probably reflects what you stand for as a person. I don’t believe you can ever really pick your theme totally consciously, but you can refine it once you’ve found it.

  Writing with Your Theme

  Your ultimate challenge, when you do get around to writing the first draft of your screenplay, is to make sure that your theme is as deeply buried as possible in the first ten pages. This is widely accepted good practice in the screenwriting business. Many experts think you can see the whole story, metaphorically and symbolically, in the first ten pages. I agree.

  Remember, themes work best when they are subliminal. Your audience will be so caught up with your heroine and her M-Factor, problems, and world that they won’t be actively looking for it anyway (unless they are screenwriters, who if they are anything like me, are the biggest pains to watch films with!). All the same, it has to be there, working its magic.

  Every character and scene will then reflect your theme. As you write, you might feel tested by trying to keep it buried, but you will manage it. Further drafts will then start to feel tighter. You will sense the essential “truth” of your story emerging, stronger and clearer, with each draft. The cream has risen to the top!

  You will finally, by the third act, be able to let a character even articulate the theme, from her own viewpoint. Take the artists’ community. Your heroine artist might be contemplating her great painting when she realizes how much she misses her lover from the artist’s community. But while she loved him, her work lacked focus, and her sales dried up. So in Act 3, she just might say “I miss him.” But the audience will know she’s evaluating exactly what this priceless masterpiece has cost her personally. Was it worth it? But while she was with him, love came first. Wait until the third act for this kind of direct revelation.

  There is however, another way to find the theme. I’m telling you about this later because I didn’t want to deprive you of your lightbulb moment, which is one of the great pleasures of creativity. But this other way might satisfy you more, it depends on the kind of writer you are. This other way is by finding your story’s Metaphoric Wound.

  THE METAPHORIC WOUND

  All heroines, like all humans, carry around deeply buried unresolved pain. If she is lucky, your heroine will heal this pain during the course of her story. If she isn’t so lucky, the story will function to explore her pain rather than resolve it. You might be wondering about those heroines who are fully functional human beings until something terrible happens? Well, first you have to be honest and ask yourself if there really are people with absolutely no emotional scars or buried pain? Obviously not. But it is possible that your story is about the worse thing to happen to your heroine so far in her life.

  The deepest and most buried pain of your heroine symbolizes something I call the Metaphoric Wound of your story. In powerful stories, this deeply buried pain can be seen in many layers of your heroine’s life and world. The Metaphoric Wound is the deepest layer of meaning in your story, even deeper than the theme. Once you find out what your Metaphoric Wound is, it can help you find your theme. I will show you how to do this, but first let’s find out more about the Metaphoric Wound.

  The Metaphoric Wound is the deepest pain

  experienced by your heroine that is metaphorically visible

  in the wider world of her story.

  The Metaphoric Wound can be seen in the following levels of your heroine’s world:

  The Wider Culture

  The Metaphoric Wound can be seen in the values and customs of the wide
r world and will have an impact on the community.

  The Community

  The Metaphoric Wound can function in the way your heroine’s community is organized, and how people within the community treat each other. In turn, it can affect the family.

  The Family

  The Metaphoric Wound is often generated here, and it can be seen in how the family functions as a group. Your heroine can be wounded by her experiences here.

  The Individual

  The Metaphoric Wound caused by the family or a family member will have particular effect on your heroine and will represent her deepest pain.

  Finding the Metaphoric Wound

  To find the Metaphoric Wound, you have to delve into your heroine’s backstory, and then you have to look at the “here and now” of her world in the story. The things you are looking for are her Internal Wound, Internal Gift, External Gift, and External Wound. What do I mean by these?

  Internal Wound

  This is the most deeply felt emotional pain that your heroine has ever experienced. For a great deal of people, this is caused in childhood by a parental figure, or it is any severely traumatic event. You have to work out what this is for your heroine by looking deep into her past and present. It may be buried and deeply repressed but comes out in how she functions in relation to herself and other people. Your story might tell the cause of her Internal Wound, and what happens next, just like Lily in The Secret Life of Bees.

  Internal Gift

  Your heroine’s Internal Gift is the best coping mechanism that she has developed to protect herself from internal pain and Conflict. You can see it as a defense mechanism in her psychology. It doesn’t have to actually be very positive. A self-harmer might find the experience of cutting herself a release, like Lee in Secretary. This is her coping mechanism, her internal gift. You might think that gift is not really the right word, but I think it fits the bill because it reflects the high value your heroine unconsciously places on this defense mechanism.

  External Gift

  Now move away from the backstory and into the here and now of your heroine’s world in your story. Ask yourself what in her story is potentially the best thing that could happen to her and is a real possibility? What could bring her the most happiness? If she can accept the External Gift, emotionally, and be open to it, she will get a great deal of happiness from it. The External Gift is so powerful that it can solve your heroine’s problems.

  External Wound

  Staying in the story, ask yourself what your heroine thinks is her biggest problem right now. You might want to look at this as the biggest obstacle she has to solve, or simply the thing in her life that causes her the most sleepless nights.

  Okay, so you think you’ve got these? If you aren’t quite sure, don’t worry because we will go through some film examples. But first, I want you to absorb the following Metaphoric Wound governing principles.

  The Metaphoric Wound Governing Principles

  1. Your heroine’s Internal Gift, her coping mechanism, feeds the External Wound.

  2. The Internal Gift is a paradox. It helps your heroine cope, but it gets in the way of her solving her actual problem.

  3. The External Wound is fed by the unresolved Internal Wound. Your heroine’s lack of resolution means that she is somehow, consciously or unconsciously, contributing to her own problem.

  4. The Internal Gift has to be given up or sacrificed to achieve the External Gift.

  5. Healing the Internal Wound achieves the External Gift.

  6. The Metaphoric Wound of your story is your heroine’s Internal Wound seen thematically. It is visible in all those layers I described previously.

  7. The Metaphoric Wound is not necessarily healed in the story. If you, the writer, remain unconscious of the Wound, you might not resolve it. Similarly, you might decide that your character, for whatever reason, is unable to heal themself. It might support your theme to convey a bleak message.

  I know it seems complicated, which is why we’re going to look at some film examples to see how it all works.

  The Metaphoric Wound in a Heroine’s Story

  All About My Mother

  Manuela is the heroine. She is a donor transplant administrator, whose son Walter is killed in front of her eyes, while he chases an actress for her autograph. Manuela’s Internal Wound is the loss of her only son. Walter’s death triggers memories of Manuela’s previous loss, of her husband and Walter’s father, when she was pregnant eighteen years earlier. He didn’t die, but she left him when he became a transsexual “Lola.”

  Manuela’s Internal Gift is running away, her coping mechanism. She has been running away from Lola for eighteen years and never told Walter who his father was. Her External Wound is the fact that she has to face her ex-husband Lola again. This is because she wants to honor Walter, because just before he was killed, Manuela promised she would tell him who his father was.

  Manuela’s External Gift is finally moving on, and with a new chance at motherhood. She is given a new baby to look after, also called Walter and fathered by Lola. Lola impregnated Rosa, but as he had AIDS he also gave her the virus. When Rosa dies, she leaves Walter in Manuela’s care, because Manuela cared for Rosa during her illness and became her surrogate mother. Now let’s see how the Metaphoric Wound principles relate.

  Manuela’s Internal Gift, running away, feeds the External Wound, which is not facing Lola and her guilty feelings over not telling Walter who his father was. Her Internal Wound, loss of Walter, feeds her External Wound, facing Lola. But if she doesn’t face Lola, her pain over Walter will continue. She has to relinquish her Internal Gift, running away, by going back to face Lola to honor Walter. If she tells Lola of Walter’s existence, then in some small way she will have kept her promise to Walter. By relinquishing her Internal Gift, her coping mechanism of running away, Manuela is led to Rosa and eventually finds her External Gift, Rosa’s baby, for whom she becomes a mother again.

  The Metaphoric Wound in All About My Mother is Loss. This directly evolves from the heroine’s own Internal Wound of loss, as we have seen. Now let’s see how the Metaphoric Wound is evident on all levels of Manuela’s world, from her wider culture down to her own sense of identity.

  Wider Culture: The AIDS epidemic provides the backdrop, meaning widespread loss of life.

  Community: Manuela works in donor transplants, which depend on the loss of someone’s life. In Barcelona she works for an actress, Huma, who was accidentally responsible for her son’s death, and who plays in Street Car Named Desire, which is all about loss of love, sanity, friendship.

  Family: Manuela has lost her son. She also loses Rosa, who has become a surrogate daughter to her. Agrada has lost her best friend Lola. Rosa’s mother loses her daughter. Huma loses her lover. Rosa’s father has lost his mind. All these characters that constitute Manuela’s “family” lose somebody.

  Identity: Manuela loses the meaning of her life when she loses Walter.

  The Metaphoric Wound is healed by the renewal of life. This links to the theme of All About My Mother, which could be described as “people can renew if they face their losses.” Manuela, as heroine, could have sunk into despair after Walter’s death. Instead, she seeks closure and in doing so heals her Internal Wound. As you can see, every character and every scene of All About My Mother reflects the theme of loss somehow. Now let’s see the Metaphoric Wound in a very different movie with two Heroines.

  The Holiday

  Strangers to each other, British Iris and American Amanda are both hurt by love and decide to house-swap for the holidays. They enter each other’s worlds. Amanda describes her own Internal Wound when she tells Graham, her British lover, that the most painful things in her life were her parent’s breakup and the loss of her father.

  Iris’ Internal Wound is harder to find, but there are clues in the story. She’s in love with Jasper who uses her shamelessly, yet she forgives him every time. When we learn that Iris’ mother is a publishing executive, you can�
�t help but think there was a problem in the mother/ daughter relationship for Iris to have such low self-esteem. But that is her Internal Wound — desperately low self-esteem. Amanda’s External Wound is messing up another relationship when she really wants one to work. For Iris, it’s Jasper’s engagement to another woman when she is still in love with him.

  As for the two heroines’ Internal Gifts, for Amanda is it not being able to cry. She is so well defended against pain she can’t let feelings overwhelm her even if she tries. Her crying capacity is in lockdown. For Iris, it is putting other people’s needs before her own and being utterly dependable, even to the point of masochism. Their External Gifts are again different; for Amanda, it comes in the form of a devoted and warm man, Graham. For Iris, it’s learning to be the leading lady in her own life.

  Amanda’s self-protection has fed her External Wound of dysfunctional relationships with men. She has to give up her Internal Gift of self-protection by allowing herself to feel for Graham, her External Gift. This happens when she leaves Graham, whose love has touched her. By healing her Internal Wound and opening up to be vulnerable, she achieves her External Gift, a really good relationship and no more loneliness.

  For Iris, it’s a little different. Her Internal Wound of inadequacy creates her External Wound of a masochistic relationship, which leaves her lonely. Her Internal Gift of dependability feeds her problems with Jasper, her External Wound. By giving up dependability in order to look after herself better, she is finally able to let go to receive her External Gift of “gumption” — being the leading lady of her life. This brings her to the healthier promise of a relationship with Miles.

  The Metaphoric Wound in The Holiday is loneliness. In stories with two or more main characters, see what their Internal Wounds have in common. In The Holiday, Iris’ low self-esteem and Amanda’s steely emotional defenses keep them both single and alone. Now let’s see how the Metaphoric Wound, loneliness, is evident on all levels of Amanda and Iris’ worlds, from the wider culture down to their own sense of identity.