The Woman in the Story Read online

  True Caryatid wives are no nonsense women. They know their roles and responsibilities, and they do their best to meet them. Even sex, even if they don’t like it very much. Marriage is a tradition, the normal way of life. Your Caryatid heroine takes her marriage vows very seriously. If she’s a Nurturing type too, then she’ll be the perfect wife and mother, as far as society goes. Just because she’s traditional doesn’t mean she can’t and doesn’t love deeply.

  Royal and aristocratic heroines are women who are expected to play their part in society in a Caryatid-like manner. Anne Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl tries to keep her husband Henry VIII happy but her Amazon and Lover role choices always get in the way. The same applies to Georgiana in The Duchess. Georgiana marries when she is very young, not more than a girl, and the grand status of her husband-to-be is exciting to her. Both wives make the big mistake of expecting love to come before duty in a punitive, patriarchal system. A true Caryatid would never make such a mistake. In Elizabeth, the young Elizabeth flirts with the idea of love, but she can’t hide her true role choice. She’s a Caryatid who knows a husband would reduce her ability to rule as she wants. Her decision? To marry England. This is in stark contrast to Victoria in The Young Victoria, a different type of Caryatid who discovers she can’t handle royal affairs without the support of her husband Albert.

  The saddest Caryatids have to be the widows in Deepa Metha’s Water. They form a rare group of women who are both Caryatids and Victims due to their culture’s enforcement of these role choices. Whether young or old, as soon as their husbands die, these women lose all status and have to live far away from their families in the house of widows. Even their heads are shaved, to effectively brand them undesirables.

  Boss

  A Boss is a woman who has tangible power over others. This role choice is often given to antagonists and secondary characters in stories. Bosses are women who choose to lead, control, and compete rather than nurture. Bosses get a kick out of power and profit, whether it’s real or symbolic. They want to achieve, and the domestic sphere is not their favorite place. It’s the role choice for your heroine when she is driven, ambitious, and a team leader. Bosses are all about boundaries and sticking to them. They can show “feminine” intuition to do their jobs well, but retaining power and doing the job is the name of the game for these women.

  In real life there are many female Bosses, who are wives and mothers. Like Mothers, if a heroine is Boss, the story tends to be about her being a Boss, and, sometimes, the mess she makes of the job. The Proposal showed a powerful and bitchy woman, universally hated by her team, who lets down her defenses only after falling in love with her male assistant. In Mamma Mia!, Donna’s not coping with her rundown hotel. The same goes for motel proprietess Brenda in Bagdad Café. For some reason, competent female Bosses in the heroine role aren’t as visible on our screens as they are in real life. Our shows are full of women characters in the workplace, however, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, House, and Criminal Minds, to name a few. But the question remains as to why so few women characters are in charge? Does this reflect fear on the producers’ part or a reality about women and power? Are women still coming to terms with having power and are anxious about it, unlike men who may have more of an inbuilt sense of entitlement? In the TV show Damages, Patty Hewes is a true pioneer as a complex heroine who is a Boss. She has a shifting ethical code, has charismatic character traits, and is brilliant at manipulating others.

  Queens

  Boss Heroines, when they do exist, are often royals. The heroine’s challenge tends to be about attaining or maintaining power, and Conflicts in her story tend to revolve around the widespread acceptance of her sex. Queens also lose out on feeling like normal women and are more than acutely aware of what is impermissible in their lives. In The Queen, Elizabeth II is not allowed to grieve and nurture her grandsons, nor are her real feelings about Diana, The Princess of Wales, admissible.

  Institutional Bosses

  There are lots of these in stories, but rarely are they the main character. M in the Bond movies, Pamela Landy in the Bourne movies, Corinne in Rendition, Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada, and Wilhelmina in Ugly Betty are all good examples. These women’s internal Conflicts are kept firmly under control. They are true Caryatids who are motivated to support the institution, but most important to them is their role and status within it.

  Evolving Bosses

  Weeds explores the criminal rivalry between two women drug dealer bosses, Nancy and Heylia. Both women have families to support and Nurturing role choices to fulfill, yet they crave money and power, and the competition doesn’t put them off. Their other role choices can create a great deal of Conflict with their role of Boss.

  Community Pillar

  Community Pillar is the role choice for the female do-gooder. She is all about supporting the community, but unlike a Boss, she doesn’t want power. Being a leader is not her style; she prefers to be part of a group. Heroines can choose this role choice when they want to be part of the team or help create something with like-minded others. The emphasis on the role choice is about laying good foundations rather than knocking structures down. Although this role choice doesn’t Conflict with being family minded, the Community Pillar likes to extend her reach beyond the home.

  Crumbling Pillars

  Sometimes Community Pillars have a crisis of faith in their values. Tea with Mussolini is about a group of Community Pillars in the form of British and American female expatriates in Florence. As Mussolini rises to power, the women’s belief in him and their rightful place in Italy are put to the test and eventually shattered. Vera Drake, the illegal abortionist in Vera Drake, is a Community Pillar in that she tragically and misguidedly thinks she is only doing good. In both movies, the Community Pillars fall foul of the community and become Outsider Heroines. Community Pillars are frequently found in Sororities, particularly groups of older women. The heroines in Calendar Girls and Ladies in Lavender function in Sororities. They can be married or are resolute spinsters.

  Younger Community Pillars

  Gracie Hart in Miss Congeniality is an Amazon Community Pillar who has to do good (her police job) by protecting a Sorority of Community Pillars, the beauty queens in peril. Values about femininity clash but ultimately Gracie saves the institution from disruption and danger. Cheerleaders and university sororities in the U.S. and Girl Guides and Brownies in the U.K. are young groups of Community Pillars. Think about what kind of Community Pillar institutions exist for young women in your own culture. What do they stand for?

  Tips for Writing the Caryatid Role Choice

  Characterizing Cultural Values

  Use other characters, even minor ones, to represent the dominant values of the culture your heroine lives in. This doesn’t mean endless snippets of dialogue; it can be as simple as an image of a minor character doing something, like walking to church with the family or the community making an effort.

  Community Building

  If your heroine isn’t very traditional, or she’s an Outsider, think about ways the status quo might protect or help her. Are there any moments in your story where she has to work to conserve or preserve the status quo despite her distrust in it?

  Your Heroine’s Identity

  Marriage will either make your heroine a stronger person because she’s found her soul mate, or it will destroy her sense of identity. Work out how marriage is going to work for her or change her.

  The Caryatid Role Choice in Close-Up

  An Education

  Jenny returns to the girls’ school she walked out on to get married before sitting her exams. Now that her relationship is over, she realizes what she has lost. She asks the headmistress if she can come back to school as she has seen the error of her ways. The headmistress is a Boss Caryatid who upholds traditional education for girls. She listens to Jenny but refuses to let her come back. In this short scene, the heroine is tested by the Caryatid who now represents values she finally respects. Th
rough rejection, Jenny becomes even more determined to get to that bastion of the establishment, the University of Oxford.

  EXERCISE: YOUR HEROINE’S ROLE CHOICE QUESTIONNAIRE

  Imagine you are your heroine as she appears at the start of your story and complete the questionnaire. By the end of the questionnaire you will have developed your heroine’s role choices. You will get a better sense of her identity and her relationship to the outside world. As you develop your story, you will be able to see how her role choices might change, as she grows and develops or is put into challenging situations.

  YOUR HEROINE’S ROLE CHOICE QUESTIONNAIRE

  1. What are your deepest beliefs? What do you stand for?

  2. Who or what most influenced these beliefs and ideals?

  3. If you have children, how would you describe your parenting style?

  4. Who supports you? Do you support others?

  5. What does beauty mean to your own identity? Describe your self-image.

  6. What do you most love/hate about your job? What would you change about it?

  7. If you don’t work, why not? How do you support yourself?

  8. What are your personal ambitions?

  9. What are your career ambitions?

  10. How far have you come in achieving them?

  11. Describe your position in your community?

  Do you like your community?

  12. How would you like to be remembered?

  MAKING IT PERSONAL

  Chapter 4

  Now that you’ve got a much clearer idea of your heroine and some of her role choices, it’s a good time to start thinking about the meaning of your heroine’s story. What is it really about?

  FINDING THE STORY

  Finding the right story is important to support your theme and what you really want to say by writing your screenplay. What do I mean by story?

  A Heroine’s Story is her emotional and physical process of experiencing a certain situation that unfolds in a narrative.

  You might notice that terms like solving her problem, following a goal, or coming to terms with so and so are not at the heart of this definition of story. It’s bigger and broader because it encompasses a huge variety of heroines’ stories, from U.S. blockbuster to art-house French cinema by way of Japan. Solving problems and having dilemmas are important to certain story types, but very often heroines inhabit stories that go against the grain of conventional dramatic tradition. They might not be about transformation but may be more about exploration of a certain theme or idea. That’s why they can be so radical. Some heroine’s stories show journeys that end up in a dead-end, with the heroine back where she started. Sometimes heroines don’t actually change after their experiences, but the world around them changes. At the risk of repeating myself, a heroine’s story is invariably a product of the writer’s culture. Not all story traditions are the same. You will know best the story traditions you want to work within and those you want to subvert.

  If it helps you, you can think about a heroine’s story as her journey in terms of where your heroine starts from and where she ends up. You might have already thought about a physical journey she might go on, or your story might be more internal and emotional. Or you might be one of those high-concept writers, who always start with an idea you want to play around with.

  Working out your heroine story type and theme will help you to develop your heroine’s story and bring you closer to what you really want to say.

  HEROINE STORY TYPES

  A heroine story type is a way of breaking down your heroine’s emotional and physical process of her situation (i.e., her story) into a recognizable type. Each heroine story type can be seen as the powerful engine that drives and compels her. All your characters, main and secondary, will have a story type of their own. They do not have to be the same as the heroines, and it is probably better if they aren’t.

  Heroine story types can work with many different structures, as we will see. They can also appear in any genre of film. It’s a good idea to try to choose a story type early, but don’t worry if you don’t know

  It might be that your heroine distinctly jumps from one heroine story type to another during the course of the film. That’s okay! If it makes sense to your story then that’s great. But very often, your heroine’s story will reflect one dominant story type. Phil Parker, in The Art and Science of Screenwriting (1999), defines ten story types; his book is a useful guide for the use of the story types. Here are the main heroine story types that I’ve identified.

  Path to Wholeness

  Group Endeavor

  Survival

  Rites of Passage

  Tests of Love

  Quest

  The Wandering Woman

  The Talent

  Let’s have a look at each one.

  PATH TO WHOLENESS

  The heroine feels emotionally incomplete or wounded; might be completely abused or mentally ill; could be recovering from illness; and might feel totally betrayed or let down by love and she badly needs to recover. Her story focuses on her experience of becoming whole, or trying to become whole. Examples include I’ve Loved You So Long; Under the Tuscan Sun; Boys Don’t Cry; In Her Shoes; Precious; Girl, Interrupted; and Lost in Translation.

  TESTS OF LOVE

  The heroine is absorbed by finding love or experiencing problems in her relationship. Love problems can range from anything as big as war to her own unresolved fear of abandonment (e.g., When Sally Met Harry, Sex and the City: The Movie). Sweeping epic love stories, such as The English Patient and Cold Mountain, fall into this type, as do intense dramas such as The Edge of Love.

  GROUP ENDEAVOR

  A group of heroines who depend on each other or live together as a community have an experience together in which they are interdependent. It may be a holiday, a quest, or coming to terms with a change from the outside (e.g., St. Trinian’s, Female Agents, Calendar Girls, Tea with Mussolini, and The Virgin Suicides).

  QUEST

  The heroine gives herself a quest or mission, or is given one by an external factor or person. She spends her time pursuing the quest, even if it ends up having a different outcome than she expected. Quests can range from saving a flock of geese in Fly Away Home to finding out the truth about a husband’s disappearance in Rendition to gaining a law degree at Harvard as in Legally Blonde.

  SURVIVAL

  The heroine’s life, or those of the people she loves, is under threat. All her energies revolve around staying alive and outwitting or defeating the forces of destruction. Survival can include emotional survival when the heroine’s whole identity is being savaged by another person (e.g., Elizabeth, The Descent, Flight Plan, The Brave One, and Rabbit-Proof Fence).

  WANDERING WOMAN

  The heroine needs to keep moving. She’s essentially nomadic or naturally an outsider. Her story just might be another stop along the way of her life. She might have found herself stuck and needs to move on but can’t. She doesn’t feel the need to be whole but her eyes might be opened to other needs as she travels (e.g., the mothers in Hideous Kinky, Chocolat, Tumbleweeds, Mermaids, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, TranSylvania, and Mona Lisa Smile).

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  The heroine is dealing with a major transition that propels her into a new stage of her life. These can be pregnancy, abortion, motherhood, the empty-nest syndrome, stepmotherhood, loss of a child, marriage, divorce, grandmotherhood, and menopause (e.g., Stepmom, 10 Things I Hate about You, and Thirteen).

  THE TALENT

  The heroine has a talent that is central to her sense of identity. In pursuing her talent the heroine encounters many different experiences and obstacles (e.g., Frida, La Vie en Rose, Babette’s Feast, Sylvia, and Amelia).

  Choosing a Heroine Story Type

  Do any of these grab you? If you are a character-driven writer, you probably can relate to one of these. If you are a concept- or idea-driven writer in the early stages of a story, it might be harder to choose. Th
ere’s no right or wrong. If you can’t decide, you might prefer to think about your theme first. Working out the theme can eventually lead you to find the right heroine story type.

  It’s very common in the initial stages of writing to think your heroine is on a certain type of story, only to later realize that you really want her focusing on something else. An ensemble screenplay might turn into a single protagonist screenplay, and then you’ve gone from Group Endeavor to another heroine story type. For instance you might really believe you want to explore the lives of nuns in a convent. One nun keeps shouting for your attention, and before you know it, you’re giving her a great deal more narrative space. Depending on what the nun is bothered about, you can find her individual heroine story type. If she’s having a crisis of faith, she’s probably following the Path of Wholeness. If she’s fallen in love with the convent gardener, she’s on a Test of Love heroine story type. If it’s a horror film, and the devil has infiltrated the convent, then suddenly she’s following the Survival heroine story type.

  If you really can’t decide, ask your heroine! Sit down and write a stream of consciousness from her point of view. Remember how she persuaded you to give her the role of heroine in the first place?

  Heroines Story Types in Close-Up

  In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Otilia is on a quest to support Gabi’s effort to have an illegal abortion. Her quest involves some horrible twists and turns, in which she will be forced to sleep with the bullying and misogynistic abortionist and risk years of imprisonment in Romania. Gabi is on a rites of passage story as she experiences the decision to get rid of her baby. She is vulnerable, passive, and frightened.