In the wake of the election, I am a different person. I am now afraid of many things, especially what is going to happen given the volatility I see in the world and in my neighborhood. It’s something I’ve never experienced in this country, in what I now realize with mortifying clarity has been a very sheltered life. And listen: I’m old. I remember first-hand the end of the Vietnam years.
I had assumed a very different outcome on November 8th, and what happened upended my worldview overnight. It forced me to look at lots of things in a new light, and look deep into the why behind the actions of others, especially those whose political views are different from mine. This made me think a lot about story, because story is all about how someone’s worldview changes.
And precisely because of that, stories have the power to help bring the country together at this divisive time. Story can help us see each other as we are. Help us empathize, understand and perhaps find common ground.
After all, stories are about how your protagonist’s worldview evolves. They’re about how she overcomes a driving misbelief that has been holding her back, in the face of a problem she can’t avoid.
That’s why your job as a novelist – first and foremost — is to understand why your characters believe they are right, especially when they’re not. They always have a reason – and that reason isn’t because they’re a jerk, or stupid, or simply mean. That reason is something their life taught them, and to them it feels real and good and true. But – and this is the key thing — it doesn’t mean it is true.
The purpose of a story is to help your protagonist see their misbelief for what it is: wrong. As Proust so eloquently said, “The only true voyage of discovery isn’t in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” The goal of any story is to give your protagonist – and by extension your reader – new eyes.
So, how do you open your protagonist eyes to the fact that what they believe, and the conclusions they’ve drawn, might not be serving them?
First, as Seth Godin advises in a short post he just wrote, you must know – and respect — why your protagonist believes it in the first place:
“The other person is always right
Always right about feelings.
About the day he just experienced.
About the fears (appropriate and ill-founded) in his life.
About the narrative going on, unspoken, in his head.
About what he likes and what he dislikes.
You’ll need to travel to this place of ‘right’ before you have any chance at all of actual communication.”
What this means is that you must begin with empathy for every single character you create, even characters who do things you’d never ever do. After all, what people do isn’t what gives us empathy for them. Why they do it is where empathy comes from.
In fact that’s what empathy is. To wit: empathy is the ability to feel what other people feel about a situation for the same reason they feel it. In other words, empathy is giving dignity and weight to their feelings, even if you disagree with the conclusion they’ve drawn.
To that end I want to reiterate what I’ve been saying in this space for the past four years:
We humans are wired for story, but we don’t tend to know it – either as writers or as readers.
That’s why I open every talk I give with this statement: Writers are the most powerful people on the planet, because story is the most powerful communication tool in the world. You can change how your readers sees the world, themselves and what they do in the world by letting them experience life through your protagonist’s eyes.
That isn’t a metaphor. Story is wired into the architecture of the brain – story is how we make sense of the world around us. Not in a passive, objective, “oh that’s interesting” sort of way, but in an active, subjective, “oh, so that’s what I should do” way.
Stories don’t tell us how to act or what to do, they make us want to act – often in ways we wouldn’t even consider otherwise. Stories are a call to action, whether we’re aware of it or not, and usually we are not. Which is one of the reasons story is so potent.
Stories aren’t merely for entertainment – no matter what the writer intends. Stories are entertaining so we’ll pay attention to them – it’s biological. Stories press the pause button, allowing us to slip out of our own lives the better to experience the protagonist’s inner struggle. Stories thus tacitly change our perception of what’s right and wrong. What is sacred and what is profane. What is fair and what is not.
Stories are simulations that put facts (real and imagined) into a human context that gives them meaning and makes them actionable.
And so your novel will change how your readers see the world. It will also – in ways large and small — change what they do in the world.
For instance, do you know what is often cited as a major reason for the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s?
To Kill a Mockingbird.
In fact, a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress Center for the Book found that To Kill a Mockingbird was rated second, behind only the Bible, in books most often cited as making a difference.
Oprah Winfrey calls it “Our national novel.” Former First Lady Laura Bush said, “It changed how people think.”
How? By changing how they felt.
So if you need a reason to double down on your efforts to tell a good story, and to develop characters who are as human as you and me, this is it. If you need a time when it’s critical to do so, this is it.
Will it make you vulnerable? Absolutely. Because the world your protagonist sees, and what she ends up believing, will tell the world something about you, and what you believe. And that is scary.
But here’s the thing: no matter what you write, you are exposing yourself. You are taking a stand about what it means to be human, what matters and what doesn’t. Because that’s what stories do, they mainline meaning – through your protagonist’s inner struggle they allow us to experience what really counts in your universe.
Here’s to standing up and being counted, even when your knees are knocking.
About Lisa Cron
Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence and Story Genius: How To Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste 3 Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere). Her video tutorial, Writing Fundamentals: The Craft of Story, can be found at Lynda.com. Her TEDx talk, Wired for Story, opened Furman University’s 2014 TEDx conference, Stories: The Common Thread of Our Humanity. A frequent speaker at writers conferences, schools and universities, Lisa's passion has always been story. She currently works as a story coach helping writers, nonprofits, educators and journalists wrangle the story they're telling onto the page; contact her here.
Good post, echoing yesterday’s and calls to writers all over the online community.
What do I believe in? I’m asking that as I launch into a new project. It’s a contemporary story set in our very real America, in which a super-majority of people believe that angels are real.
The what if’s are easy. I know the questions I want answered. I know what my protagonist wants and needs. I have a point. The plot is taking shape, the inner journey is mapped, and the antagonist scares me.
What I don’t know yet is how I want my readers’ thinking to change. Because of my story, what will they do differently? So, since you’re asking, here’s a stab at it:
My belief: We must shelter and protect those who are different, because those may well be angels walking among us.
Thanks, Lisa.
Lisa,
Great piece. I’ve been in suspended disbelief since that Second Date Which Will Live in Infamy so I could enjoy the rest of my vacation. I avoided social media and the news altogether until I returned home a week ago.
“Story” played a great part in the election. As you said, “story is the most powerful communication tool in the world. You can change how your readers see the world, themselves and what they do in the world by letting them experience life through your protagonist’s eyes.”
I believe the election was won by a Master Storyteller (i.e., compulsive liar) who changed how people saw the world by creating a false world, then played upon their fears and prejudices to see the world through his eyes. And it worked.
I remember well Don’s “change the world” speech, but the funny thing is, earlier that morning, I’d met with Cathy for some individual coaching. In the course of our conversation, I told her, “I don’t simply want to write a novel, I want to change the world. (So I want to tackle this, this, and this.)” And then for Don to say the same words later in his session and continue with my exact thoughts…instant validation.
I guess this turn of events empowered us all in one way or another. I say we change the world back upright and go onward and upward from there.
I’ve been waking up every morning SINCE, struggling with how to believe in people who I know I don’t agree with. Slowly, I’ve been coming out of my shell and reaching out–but it’s difficult. My WIP is my voice. The misbelief of my MC has brought her into a world where empathy is her first thought, not her last. It serves the people she helps, but also burdens her. The antagonists in her life benefit from her misbelief, yet fail to see that it has made her a better person. This echoes so much of what is going on around us. Whether it’s the misbelief in my story or the OUTRIGHT lies that people in power are using to con us, truth must be the ultimate goal of any story. My MC will fall upon the truth. She won’t lose her empathic nature, it will only deepen it. STORY is powerful and you have helped me see that. Thanks.
I think all the madness that we experienced during this election cycle has been smoldering just under the surface and a master fabricator of lies has been poking the coals. Well, now we have a bonfire. But at least we can see what’s been there all along. Ugly? Yes. Upsetting? Absolutely. But I’d rather see the monster’s face than a mask that soothes me into thinking that everything is okay. We have our work cut out for us now. And I consider teachers like you and Donald Maass essential to that work as you help make us better at our jobs. So thank you!!
Preach it, sister. I adore this definition of story: “They’re about how she overcomes a driving misbelief that has been holding her back, in the face of a problem she can’t avoid.” There you go.
I also adore your final call to action. Since UnCon I have been asking myself how I can make my WIP more important, and in doing so, have hit upon something that makes my knees knock. So I’m going for it. We’ll see if it flies!
But honestly: while I know you fear your posts are provocative, they are like a balm to my soul, reinforcing (and sometimes explaining to me) my worldview point for point. Thank you.
Lisa–You cite To Kill a Mockingbird to illustrate the fundamental importance of empathy in books that change hearts and minds. Of course TKAM generates a great sense injustice and empathy for its characters, but if I understand you, you’re appealing to us to develop an empathic sense of our perceived opposites in the latest election. You offer Seth Godin’s interesting “the other person is always right” list to make the point.
My question is this: to fulfill your version of empathy, wouldn’t TKAM have to present an empathic view of the racist perspective in the novel?
Interesting question, Barry. For me it deepens the reading experience when I get to be in the mind of a racist or a monster, providing that the writer has let me see how he or she got to be that way. In that sense,the other person is always right. Everyone can justify their own POV through the lens of their own experience. Empathy would (hopefully) enable us to remember that during the flashpoint of an argument or confrontation. And this is just my take, but when first I read TKAM, the pervasive racism that existed in the South was part of the scenery for me. Woven, if you will, into the fabric of the book. Anyway, you got me thinking!
Barry, I think this is a case of the antagonist being the hero of his/her own story. Not to speak for Lisa, but what I take from her here is the part where the reader should understand WHY someone believes what they believe, whether or not the reader ever thinks it’s right or wrong.
All week I’ve been thinking about Mama Rose, from Gypsy–I just watched the Imelda Staunton version this past weekend (aired in November on PBS). (Spoilers below) It was such an object lesson in watching a character discover her misperception and understanding its consequences. Really, Mama Rose is both the protagonist and the antagonist of the story: she makes everyone around her miserable because she’s unhappy in her very core. But we see why…we see the loss that has triggered her behavior, and the moment when she realizes her increasingly-desperate illusion has crumbled into dust. I don’t think anyone watches Gypsy and thinks she’s doing the *right* thing, but if we didn’t care about her anyway, her discovery would have no power to it. Nor would her daughter’s gesture of forgiveness have the power that it does, in the final moments of the show.
In other words, I think there’s a big difference between showing readers the reasons for a character’s motivation, and actually having the story (or the writer) endorse that belief. But hinting at even a little bit of understanding can help avoid some kind of 2-dimensional caricature of the other.
This is a marvelous examination of the issue, Alisha. I think Harper Lee did a creditable job of humanizing the “crackers” in her story.
One scene in particular stands out — when the lynch mob comes to the jail for Tom Robinson. Atticus doesn’t condemn then as evil like a self-righteous scold. These are men he knows. He speaks to their better natures–which he knows exist. The fact that Scout plays a hand in turning the tide doesn’t obliterate the fact that both she and Atticus have reached those men by respecting their humanity.
BTW: I’ve heard the recent incarnation of Gypsy is not to be missed. Thanks for reminding me.
Bravo, Lisa. (And not in a sarcastic way.) This is one of the best Writer Unboxed pieces I’ve read, and I’ve read a LOT of compelling WU pieces.
I’d gush some more about you and your wonderful words, but today’s a full writing day for me so I’ve got to get back to putting my protagonist through hell.
Thanks for the compelling and inspiring read!
Best,
Greg Levin
Thanks, Lisa, for what feels like a permission slip. I’ve craved something akin to that for the past 30 nightmare days. Pantsuit Nation activism helps. And, always, daily storytelling. Now, an escape that heals in more ways than one…
Can I print this? Gosh, I’ve got to print this. Wonderful. This post will be highlighted and pinned to my board by noon.
Thank you, Lisa. For all you do.
Oh, and don’t be afraid. Good always wins over evil. Always. Haven’t you read the book? LOL
Hugs,
Dee
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT
This is such a powerful post. I’m going to put the phrase “mainline meaning” on a card above my desk, with the added phrase “mainline feeling”.
Thank you, for all you do and have done to light the journey.
Thank you. Thank you.
“Here’s to standing up and being counted, even when your knees are knocking.”
This is exactly how I feel as I move forward with my WIP. You, Lisa, have changed my worldview on the power of story and how our misbeliefs and our deepest desires are intertwined with our innate sense of who we are. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
xo,
Janna
Great article reminding us how our stories affect our readers.
Agreed. The pen is mightier than the sword.
And I’m discovering prayer even mightier than the pen.
Pax.
Hi, Lisa:
I agree with the entirety of what you’ve said, but I have a caveat. Stories can indeed change lives. Unfortunately, they needn’t speak to our better natures to do so.
Stories that amplify our misguided fears and hatreds abound. Many of them came into play during this election. On both sides.
The problem with narrative is that we have no “truth function” for stories, except how they make us feel. And if our feelings are distorted by fear, resentment, bitterness, hatred–then the stories we find true will speak to those feelings.
This is as true of those who believe corporations-are-evil as it is those who are convinced immigrants-are-destroying-America.
I agree that stories are “moral thought experiments” that allow us to walk along beside a character with “a driving misbelief that has been holding her back, in the face of a problem she can’t avoid.” (Brilliantly put.)
I agree as well that stories change lives.
But one of the most powerful, life-changing stories of the 20th century was about how a great nation was destroyed from within by traitors, especially those from the lesser races: gypsies, Slavs. Jews. A variation on that story is currently playing out here in the U.S. To rave reviews, I might add.
Stories are one means of fighting back and a powerful one. But another means of seeking truth — science — is under relentless attack by those who prefer stories to difficult factual inquiry.
Differential equations aren’t stories. But they are invaluable in helping us understand the world.
As I said, this is not to contradict, merely qualify.
I agree that, as writers, we find ourselves engaged in a battle to awaken our readers’ better natures–and our own. Part of that battle is with those whose notion of “better self” is at least in part antithetical to our own. And they are no less committed to winning than we are.
This particular narrative–the power of story–can’t be discussed separately from the delivery of story. As we’ve seen in un-ignorable terms during this latest election, words like truth, validity, verifiability, etc. have all but ceased to be part of political calculus. Manipulation of feelings through mastery of technology is what leads people to act. So it was in the time of Joseph Goebbels, but now the game is played at the neurological level. And these days, everyone has a camera and a microphone.
David, you (and Lisa) are so right when you apply the techno image of “hard wiring” to the brain. I think it renders obsolete the idea of stories changing the minds of those who think differently. What writers should hold in mind as they develop narratives is attracting and capturing everyone else. In terms of politics, that would be the 20 million-plus who could have voted and didn’t. How can these people be brought to feeling, and then action? Sadly, though, we have to assume that few in this group read. If they did, they would have been moved, and acted/voted.
P.S. Concerning this statement: “Stories don’t tell us how to act or what to do, they make us want to act.”
For the record, James Joyce believed the exact opposite. This, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”
For Joyce, who was influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, the proper function of art (and he obviouslyy considered literature an art) was to elicit a state of “aesthetic arrest.”
David… thanks for the Joyce quote: “The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” That’s how I see the heart of the story — the suspension of the protagonist’s thoughts and strategies — the mind is arrested and into that void enters the higher self.
And thanks for this post, Lisa… it goes in my special vault. Cheers. ~ PJ Reece
Hi, Lisa – this is the first time I’ve responded to a WriterUnboxed post. I am doing so because this post (and I’m going to sound very woo-woo here) arrived just as I was trying to figure out what a presentation would be. You’ve given me a springboard and a way of thinking that I can present as I speak about social issues in which I am involved. The stories tell the truth, and we can relate back. Thanks so much!
The more I learn about writing, the more I realize I need to pay more attention to psychology: Why people act the way they do and How to change that.
Your statement that “the purpose of a story is to help your protagonist see their misbelief for what it is–wrong,” is simple but brilliant. We could apply that to our own misbeliefs as writers, too.
Thanks for another inspirational post (and for being a Leonard Cohen fan!)
I just scrolled down quickly and saw :”The crackers in her story” Somehow, somewhere and in someway I am going to use that. I love it. I’m feeling like these times have gone crackers if you ask me (and yes, that is a jab at all the scary white men in He Who Shall Not Be Named’s cabinet). The head of a fast food chain might become the next Secretary of Labor? Has anyone ever worked in fast food? Has anyone seen how fast food employees are treated? We’re going third-world fast, that’s for sure… and I’m already kissing my job goodbye.
Point being … yes we need some good vulcan mind-melding stories and fast. One thing I’ve always wondered though: We see a lot of anti-heroes … maybe Dexter as an example … What happens when people “mind-meld” with them? Do they kill for the greater good? Do they do things to people who they believe are criminals without any type of due process and think it’s ok? I’m wondering about our current culture and the danger Story has posed over the last ten or so years. Language warning: “That fucker had it coming”-type of protagonist … I think these stories are dangerous because the people watching them ,,, most likely not you or me … but the man who shot up the pizza place because he ‘really believed’ Hillary Clinton had a child pedophile ring going on in there… where’s the due process and evidence of that (or weapons of mass destruction preceding the Iraq war for that matter)? Did see some hero on TV who saved the day by doing something similar? Yeah, I think Story is powerful and in these times, very dangerous. When facts mean nothing, but feeling is everything … we definitely need to start churning out stories of our own diverse struggles in this world and do what we can to bring people closer together. And I think empathy is key, because if we drill deeper into our characters and stay away from the black and white of good and evil, and realize that life is about nuance and compromise–okay, I’m getting off my soapbox horse thing now… well almost… A GOOD (but not perfect) example was the movie Arrival. Yes the pace was slow, but it was still interesting because it was about humanity and fear and the unknown and the people of our world coming together for peace in the end. I’m totally being general here, but that’s because I’m tired and I don’t want to give anything away!
With all that said, great post Lisa. I’m so down.
I don’t post very often but at some point I realized that as a person I needed to be true. Everywhere. But as a writer? I have deadlines on the horizon, the close horizon, and I had pretty much thought, Screw it, I’ll write light, lighter than usual. Then came Porter Anderson’s Escapism is for Readers post. It sent me to the beach to have a few shouted words at the ocean. Thank heavens for an unbiased listener. How do you write true when you don’t know where true is. My current characters are as lost as I feel. Guess we’ll have to figure it out together. But I do realize that solitary isn’t always the best path, and just wanted to say thanks for this post and for this community.
Lisa,
Thank you for this post. I felt the point was driven home with the To Kill a Mockingbird reference. While I was reading this, I thought of other stories that have changed the world in ways you mentioned.
What came to mind was the Bible. When the Bible was first published in English, it gave the common folk access to religion that previously, only priests had access to. Fast forward to the modern and it’s changed the way people think and believe, regardless if you believe in it yourself.
I guess the same could be said of any major religion’s scripture.