2nd of 5 installments, from How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream

If You’re Going to Invest in Yourself You’ll Have to Steal Time for Your Dreams

What is time?

Unlike oxygen, an element which is objectively, scientifically definable, and more or less beyond our control, time is man-made, relative to perception and subject to choice. The Type C Personality (C for Creative) learns to redefine time subjectively, in order to become successful by his own standards. Objective time, dictated by Greenwich Mean Time with an occasional correction for NASA, leads only to the conformity of repetition. Subjective time alone allows us to distinguish ourselves and to achieve our dreams of success.

Logos vs Mythos

According to the classical Greeks, the two primary ways of perceiving the world were known to them as logos (for the Accountant¹s logic) and mythos (for the Visionary¹s simultaneity). The Visionary’s belief in eternity is what makes the Type C’s life change from barely bearable to ever enthusiastic. “To himself,”³ Samuel Butler wrote, everyone is immortal. He may know he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead. The Visionary¹s eternity is the experience of mythic time that occurs when you “lose yourself” in the pursuit of your dream. It’s Br’er Rabbit’s ‘”briar patch” speech: “Throw me anywhere, but please don¹t throw me in the briar patch!” The briar patch, of course, is Rabbit’s favorite place, his home—the Writer’s work!

Sometimes you¹ll meet an old schoolmate after years and have the experience that “t seems just like yesterday” that you were having this exact same argument, or laughing for the same reason known only to the two of you. A moment passes, as the Accountant wrests control from the Visionary: “But, on the other hand, it seems every bit like the twenty years it’s actually been.” Has it been twenty years, or was it just yesterday? William Faulkner wrote: “There is no such thing as was; if was existed there would be no grief or sorrow.” To the Visionary, time exists always in the present. He feels timeless when he’s in his own Type C time—writing!

Accountant’s time

To the Accountant, who’s kept track of the years--and also the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds--precisely, it¹s been exactly twenty years, and he can prove it by reciting all the things that have happened to both of you in the interim. The Accountant clocks time with digital precision, obsessive call-ins to the phone company¹s correct time service. The Accountant¹s time is what keeps society sane, if you call today’s society sane.

But when the Accountant¹s insistence dominates, you are denied making your dreams come true. The Accountant, nervous about anything intangible or unseen, doesn¹t believe in dreams; or, at best, assumes the worst about them: “They¹re only dreams.” Human beings can’t fly.

Visionary time

To the Visionary, whose relationship with that same friend is/was intense, it’s just yesterday. The Visionary clocks time only by reference to intensity. Lovers live from embrace to embrace, the time that’s passed between them not counting. Have you ever felt like life would pass you by when you¹re stuck in an endless left-turn lane during rush hour? How long does a second last if you’re perched at the parachute door of a plane at 15,000 feet about to make your first jump? How long is forty seconds during a 6.6 earthquake? Or at the edge of a cliff, about to rappel for the first time? A friend of mine described an encounter with a prospective client, “I spent an eternity with her for an hour and a half yesterday.”

The Visionary brings you mythic time when you engage in your career transit with all your heart, mind, and soul; when you are occupied in doing something that "takes you out of time," or "takes you out of yourself." You're ecstatic--which, from its Greek origins, literally means "standing outside" yourself. "I don't know where the time went," is what you say when you've just passed fourteen hours creating the whole magical kingdom of Tumbukti and its graphics--and your spouse, sent by the worried Accountant to tell you you've missed an important dinner party, is banging on the door because you've taken the phone off the hook. Like Alice's White Rabbit, the Accountant would always have you believe that you're late for a very important date. And the Accountant doesn't like it one bit when your Mind's Eye stops to question how important that date may be; or, whether you made the date in the first place or whether it was made for you. Type Cs insist on making their own dates because their Mind’s Eyes have learned how to insure that mythic time gets preference over logical time.

You've had this experience: You've told yourself you're just going to steal "two hours" to work on your dream. You go into the briar patch. One hour and fifty-five minutes have gone by, during which you've been “lost”--fully engrossed in your writing, without a thought for the outside world that operates on the Greenwich clock. The hours have passed "like a minute" (the Visionary's way of talking makes the Accountant crazy). Then, you look up at the clock to discover that only five minutes remain of your bargained for two hours. How did you know to look up at the five-minute mark? Because your Accountant never sleeps, even when he's been taken off duty. If you decide to remain in the mythic time of your dream work beyond the five minutes remaining--that is, beyond the exactly two hours you set aside--the Visionary has won this particular encounter. The Accountant has lost. If you decide to quit "on time," you may think the Accountant has won, and the Visionary lost.

What's wrong with this win-lose scenario is that it's exhausting, and impossible to maintain in the long run. Most people, faced with this constant natural strife between the two aspects of their minds, have allowed the Accountant to take over entirely as the only peaceful alternative. They've chosen the Accountant's conservative, safe way of behaving because the daily battle is too costly in energy and emotion. If the Visionary "wins" the five-minute battle, for example, and you continue working on your new invention for another four hours instead of the two you'd set aside, guess how hard it's going to be for the Accountant to agree to the next two hours you want to steal. The Accountant will use every instrument in the arsenal of procrastination to postpone the trip to the workshop.

How to avoid losing time

Francesco Petrarch: It is appointed for us to lose the present in the expectation of the future.

Petrarch, the first "Renaissance man," was aware that we spend a large majority of our time "somewhere else" than in the present moment. Planning for the future, worrying about the past--so much so that by the time you reach middle age the two horses, Past and Future, are engaged in a life-and-death race along your internal timeline. Competing for your vitality, stealing your present. The time you spend on past responsibilities, past regrets, past relationships, eats into the time available for growth and progress toward your future goals.

If we don't recognize "what's going on here," as Accountant time and Visionary time battle in our perceptions, we can get very confused. When we get confused, the Accountant can take control of our lives. For most people, the Accountant has been in full control. Consequently, they are frustrated, bored, caught in a rut. With the help of Mercury's powerful caduceus--whose two snakes represent the taming of past and future around the strength of present awareness--the entrepreneur's now-open Mind's Eye can transform the bloody battlefield into the altar of your hopes and dreams. Awakening his Mind's Eye, Jack London said:

“I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

This anti-Accountant declaration is made by your Mind’s Eye--which knows that only by marrying the Accountant's logic with the Visionary's myth will the present be captured for effective dream work, in lieu of the Visionary wasting the present in daydreaming, or the Accountant in obsessing about the past and the future. When your Mind's Eye takes charge of these constant time wars, productivity combines with peace of mind. The photographer Ansel Adams said, "I'm amazed at how many people have emotional difficulties. I have none. If you keep busy, you have no time for them."


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1st of 5 installments, from How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream

If You're Going to Invest in Yourself You’ll Have to Steal Time for Your Dreams

Follow your dream, and, by definition, you can't fail. Success lies in the following. If you have a dream, you have the responsibility to yourself and to the source of dreams to make it come true. That means finding time to "do what you have to do"--the very opposite of "marking time." Our minds experience life on a timeline of their own invention, a continuum that stretches from our first moment of consciousness to our last. "The end of the world," said Bernard Malamud, “will occur when I die. After that, it's everyone for himself.”

And finding time in our accelerated world where we hear of "flextime," "time-elasticity," the sweet spot in time," virtual time,” “time shifting,” and "time slowing down” is more confusing than ever before. A little over a century ago, if you missed a stagecoach you thought nothing of waiting a day or two for the next one to come along. Today you feel frustrated if you miss one section of a revolving door! So many of today's "time-saving devices" prove to be frauds---requiring more time to select, install, maintain, and update than it used to take without them. It's hard to believe that a few short years ago we had not yet become addicted to FAX machines, microwaves, VCRs, earphones, cell phones, answering machines, voicemail--and more recently the time-killer of them all, email! All these inventions, as helpful as they can be to the Accountant's output level, suck up our time in ways that, unless they are examined and acknowledged, become quite destructive to the realization of the writer’s dream.
Things have gotten so bad that we can't really manage time any more. We’re now forced to steal it.

Doing the wrong things, no matter how fast, or how well, you do them, or how many of them you do, will not advance your dream. Don't confuse efforts with results.

Those who break out of busy work and into the success they’ve dreamed of have learned to redefine time. If you recognize that time is merely a concept, a social or intellectual construct, you can make the clock of life your clock; then determine what you do with it.



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A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT- Part Four

A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT
Continued From previous post: How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity
Chapter Thirteen: Perfecting Your Craft

Now that we’ve got a handle on the basic elements of the novelist’s craft, let’s look at some of the techniques you’ll use to create your stories.

First vs. third person narrative

I recommend that writers stick to writing in third person during the early part of their careers. In general, only experienced novelists can write effectively in first person, because with a prodigious amount of writing under their belts, they understand the clear distinction that must be made between a fictional narrator and the author himself.

For example, in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which I consider to be the first modern novel, the narrator is introduced to us from the beginning as someone who has a point of view distinct from the author’s. He debates the spelling of Quixote’s name, but remarks that it is ultimately unimportant to his story, “…providing that in the telling of it we do not depart one iota from the truth.”

First person storytelling only works if the storyteller is himself clearly fictional. The storyteller must be a character in the book, explicitly or implicitly, with his own clearly defined point of view. It must be obvious to the reader that this is not the author doing the talking. This is trickier than it may sound. New writers often struggle with the nuances of “voice” in their novels. This is one technique that’s better left for a later phase of your career.

Write what you know—or what you can imagine

Everyone tells you to write about what you know best, which for most people is themselves and their personal experience. What they don’t tell you is that fictionalizing your life is an entirely different matter, one that’s fraught with perils. Just because your life has been filled with hazards and drama doesn’t mean it translates well to the novel. Usually it’s for a simple reason: your life is in chronological order, a novel must be written in dramatic order. That’s what Sophocles, the great Greek tragedian, said, “Count no man happy until he is dead. The ending is all.”

Your own experience is a goldmine for dramatic inspiration, though, if not for dramatic structure. It’s all right to turn your relatives and acquaintances into characters, but proceed with caution. You don’t want to get hit with a libel suit. Besides, they do have a right to their privacy.

Every writer taps into the reservoir of his own personal acquaintances in order to garner material for his characters—how else could he create them? But the trick to doing this effectively, legally, and ethically is not to borrow too much from any given real person. Your characters should be an amalgam of the people you know.

It’s common for a character to be a combination of three or four real people from the author’s memory. He’s just taken the most memorable attributes of each and rolled them into one. Look for the characteristics that make the most dramatic combination, and above all, that serve your story’s action.

Your writing time

The secret to making time your ally instead of your enemy is to respect your own personal rhythms. Follow your energy. If the task of plotting everything out meticulously on index cards stops your creative process in its tracks, the odds are against your ever getting past the first blush of any idea.
If this is the case, skip this step and come back to it later. As I mentioned earlier, you will need to get all your elements working in concert before you enter that first keystroke. But you don’t need to have every scene plotted out before you begin. If it works best for you, you can write the first third of your book with the heat of inspiration, then stop and outline the rest of it. Leave the end to suggest itself along the way.

Beating the middle

The middle portion of a novel seems to be the toughest part for writers to get through. Many novels fizzle out in midstream because their writers have lost their perspective. Writers get exhausted, and sometimes mistake this normal, natural exhaustion for depression. They begin to second-guess their decision to undertake the project. And their exhaustion colors their judgment with negativity. Pretty soon, they’ve convinced themselves that the novel isn’t worth finishing, and they abandon it. But this drop in enthusiasm is just a symptom. It’s a normal part of the process, one that you should anticipate and prepare yourself to deal with before it cripples your efforts.

The best way to handle this inevitable burnout is to take vacations. Lots of them. Plan to take them at regular intervals, and any time you feel the writers’ doldrums starting to creep in.
Does the prospect of walking away from the project for a week or two fill you with anxiety? Good. That’s the whole idea. By stepping back from the process whenever it starts to bog down, you’re putting a healthy pressure on yourself. You’ll feel that much more compelled to use your time productively when you do get back to it.

Creating a story of 250 pages or more is a daunting task. You can make it feel like less of a monster by dividing it up into smaller chunks. Keep plugging away at this series of manageable-sized tasks until the rush of adrenaline that comes along toward the end of a project scoops you up and carries you to the finish line.

Read this entire post from the beginning.

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What Is the Protocol for Writers Emailing Their Managers & Agents?

EMAIL

Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It

What Is the Protocol for Writers

Emailing Their Managers & Agents?


Email is the major time-devouring dragon of our times. We all know its advantages, but its disadvantages—inundation, infinity, etc.—so often outweigh the advantages that many execs end up discontinuing personal responses in favor of handing all email off to assistants. If we spent all our time answering email, there’d be no time left to develop or market your projects—which is our priority. If you don’t want to end up completely out of touch with your rep, consider the following protocol:

1) Don’t send your agent or literary representation more than one email every couple of weeks. If you have that many needs, you will end up on his “life is too short list” before you know it.

2) Consider getting your questions answered another way (from a third party, by calling or emailing the rep’s assistant, from a book, from the Internet, etc.).

3) Keep your emails short—no longer than three lines max. The people we email daily (buyers, financers, publishers, producers, studios, agents, lawyers) normally communicate in tiny bytes—2 or 3 words!

4) Don’t put more than one subject in an email. This causes “time block.” Can’t answer the entire email until we know the answer to each question so it goes into the “later” file immediately.

5) Don’t email unnecessary follow-ups, like “thanks.” They just add to the burden.

A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT- Part Three

A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT
Continued From previous post: How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity
Chapter Thirteen: Perfecting Your Craft

Action line

Action isn’t the same thing as plot. Your action line is the direction in which your story moves. If you’re writing a tragedy, your story has to move from happiness to unhappiness. If your novel has a happy ending, you have to put your character in a hole and make him dig his way out—you have to start him out unhappy and let him make the journey to happiness. Whatever the case, there has to be a change. Your story has to move from one state to another. If it doesn’t, it will meander, sputter, and lose its drama.
Here are some of the fundamental attributes of your action line:

1.) Conflict: As we discussed, action occurs when your protagonist meets obstacles to his goal. Whether he succeeds or fails with a given obstacle depends on who he is, and on the mythic pattern that is the underpinning of your story.

2.) Turning Points: During the natural course of the story, your protagonist will encounter turning points, so called because they literally spin the story off in a different direction. Your protagonist will come to the first turning point early in the story. It’s the event that launches him off on his mission. The second turning point comes toward the end of the story. It sets the stage for the ultimate confrontation that will culminate in your story’s climax. Both turning points are intimately connected to your protagonist’s motivation.

3.) Plot Twists: Twists, also called reverses, are exactly what they sound like: an unexpected turn of events, or a revelation, that accelerates the action. Your action line doesn’t have to contain twists, but they help. Often your second turning point will be a twist, though they can happen at virtually any time. The twist in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game comes at the very end, and gives the previous climax scene an entirely different meaning.

The trick to writing an effective twist is to make it so that your readers don’t see it coming, but when they look back on it, they couldn’t imagine it happening any other way. There can be no clearer example in recent memory than the stunning revelation in The Sixth Sense, which had film audiences all across the country exclaiming, “How could I have missed that?”

4.) Climax: Your obstacles have been getting tougher throughout the story, but the crisis your protagonist faces at the climax blows all the others away. This queen mother of all obstacles brings your story to its darkest hour, the point which Joseph Campbell in A Hero’s Journey named “the Inmost Cave.” If your protagonist can rise to the occasion and face this challenge, he opens the door for the resolution of his problems.

The triadic shape of all good fiction

All good fiction has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Borrowing from screenwriting, these are in essence your First Act, Second Act and Third Act. Each has its own shape, nature and function. Your First Act brings you from the protagonist’s initial introduction and the setup of the situation to the first turning point that launches your protagonist into his mission. Your middle, or Second Act, the most challenging portion for many writers, shows that your protagonist is developing as he tackles an ever-escalating series of challenges. Your Third Act, your resolution, is the place where your protagonist overcomes his difficulty and achieves his mission.

You’ll need to have these portions of your story clear before you begin to write. But don’t become a slave to your structure. Plot your way through your first draft, then when you revise, throw your outline away and just tell the story.

But how will you know where to begin the action? Some writers think it’s necessary to go all the way back to the birth of their protagonist. But not all occurrences are drama. Drama only begins as soon as something compelling is happening. William Goldman counsels writers to start their scenes as far into the action as they can. I’ve often taught my students to look at their first drafts the way they’d look at a fish they’ve just caught and are about to clean. Just as they’d lop off the fish’s head, they should remove and discard any beginning parts of the story where the drama hasn’t yet begun. You wouldn’t serve inedible parts of the fish to your dinner guests; don’t serve un-riveting parts the story to your readers.

The first and continuous question you must ask yourself as you write is, “how will my readers respond if I tell the story in this order?” The second is just as important: “Do I want them to respond that way?”

Dramatic Setting

How do you decide where to set your story? You pick the location that will enhance the dramatic tension the most. When in doubt, look to your protagonist for answers. What kind of location would showcase his motivation best?

Many writers specialize in a location they know intimately: John Irving’s New Hampshire, Pat Conroy’s North Carolina, Anne Rice’s New Orleans. You may choose to explore your own geographic roots this way. But you’re not limited to your own origins. Whatever you can A.) research and B.) imagine, you can write about. But do meticulous, extensive research on the settings you choose, even if you think you know them.

Scenes as units of drama

All drama unfolds one scene at a time. A scene is the basic unit of drama: Ideally, each scene ratchets the story along one step. A scene has a beginning, middle, and end, just like your entire novel does. They generally look like this:

Beginning: somebody is somewhere.
Middle: something is going on.
End: something happens that does or doesn’t solve the problem.

Your scene should also foreshadow a fourth part: what could happen next? This is how you dovetail your scenes to one another, bypassing the need for a transition.

Tone

A single factor determines your novel’s tone: your relationship to your audience. How do you view your narrative position—are you “preaching” it or “offering” it? Are you setting yourself up as an authority to your readers, or are you letting them in on a personal revelation, as you would a friend or confidant? Do you want them to trust what you have to say, or is it more interesting if you deliberately set them up to doubt you? If you’re not sure whether a particular tone is the right one for a given story, try it for a few pages and see if it feels natural. If it doesn’t, let it go and try something different.

These, then, are the essential building blocks of any story: character, action, setting and tone. But how do you make these elements work together to form a great story?

Aristotle addressed this question twenty-four centuries ago, and came up with a single, simple, and completely satisfying answer that is as valid today as it was in his time: unity. In any work of drama, from novel to screenplay to stage play, all the elements must come together to serve one action. In the Iliad, for example, every element serves the same purpose: to deal with the anger of Achilles. Aristotle firmly believed that in the best stories, all the components supported a single plot line.

That’s what makes good fiction so satisfying. It feels like a package. It asks a question, “what would happen if…?” then proceeds to answer it. It has a single clear mission and a definite conclusion.

This why it’s so important for you to get all the elements worked out in your mind before you start to write. Beginning writers suffering from a lack of focus tend to put in too much, because they haven’t yet identified the one line of action that everything else must serve. The best writers put in only what moves the action along in the right direction. They leave room for the readers to fill in the rest with their own imaginations.

To be continued. Check back soon!
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"I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars."

Fred Allen via Michael A. Simpson

When in doubt between two equally accurate spellings, always choose the simpler of the two; for example, “toward” instead of “towards.” It’s easy to remember and allows you to be consistent without strain.

A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT- Part Two

Continued From previous post: How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity
Chapter Thirteen: Perfecting Your Craft

All five of these elements must be present in your protagonist. And as you’ve no doubt noticed, all of these attributes link directly to your novel’s action. Because in a good story, the action happens as it does because of who your protagonist is. Conversely, your protagonist develops as he does because of the way the action unfolds. Action and character drive each other.

All the elements in your novel must support this single line of protagonist in action. This holds true as well for all the other characters who populate your novel. Whether major, minor or functional, characters only belong in your story to the extent that they serve the action line.

Minor or supporting characters have a “tag”: a single attribute that defines them and makes them memorable. Any supporting character who isn’t memorable should be instantly thrown out.

A minor character’s “tag” can be just about any attribute: greed, lechery, or like Sally’s friend in When Harry Met Sally, an all-consuming desire to get married. Don’t spell it out, though. If a character is absent-minded, show it in action, thought and dialogue, don’t use the phrase “absent-minded” or you rob audience of the chance to figure it out for themselves.

A minor character can have a motivation but not a mission—that’s your protagonist’s job. They, too can evolve, but not along the same lines as your protagonist. Your minor characters are there to make his life more interesting. Establish them quickly, then move on.

Function characters play an even less important role than supporting characters. They perform a single function without being involved in the main character’s motivation. They ride in at sunset to deliver the fateful telegram, then ride away again. They serve the drinks, drive the cabs, do their duties, then go upon their way. Unlike your protagonist and minor characters, they’re supposed to be forgettable.

Keep function characters simple. If you spend too much energy on them your readers will start to think they’re more significant than you mean them to be. Then when the character disappears, it will feel to your readers like you left something dangling, or worse, like you misled them.

Keep in mind that your characters are not real people but devices that you invented for the sole purpose of capturing and holding your reader’s attention. As such, it’s your primary responsibility to keep them interesting. The best way to do that is to give them, at all times, something significant to do.

Your audience wants action. The best writers don’t get wrapped up in the complex psychological machinations of their characters. They write to satisfy their readers’ expectations. Your audience wants more than anything to see how your protagonist gets out of the corners you paint him into. All you have to do to create a compelling novel is: don’t disappoint your readers!
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Myth to Movie: Pygmalion

First published in Produced By, the official magazine of the Producers Guild of America

Myth to Movie: Pygmalion
By Ken Atchity

The wish-fulfillment archetype —the dream become flesh—finds perennially poignant expression in stories based on the Pygmalion myth.

A Cyprian sculptor-priest-king who had no use for his island’s women, Pygmalion dedicated his energies to his art. From a flawless piece of ivory, he carved a maiden, and found her so beautiful that he robed her and adorned her with jewels, calling her Galatea (“sleeping love”). His became obsessed with the statue, praying to Aphrodite to bring him a wife as perfect as his image. Sparked by his earnestness, the goddess visited Pygmalion’s studio and was so pleasantly surprised to find Galatea almost a mirror of herself she brought the statue to life. When Pygmalion returned home, he prostrated himself at the living Galatea’s feet. The two were wed in Aphrodite’s temple, and lived happily ever after under her protection.

Though it was never absent from western literature, this transformation myth resoundingly entered modern consciousness with Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, which enlisted it to explore the complexity of human relationships in a stratified society. My Fair Lady, based on Shaw’s retelling, took the myth to another level of audience awareness.

The obligatory beats of the Pygmalion myth: the protagonist has a dream inspired by encounter with an unformed object (“Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter!”), uses his skills and/or prayers to shape it into a reality; falls in love with the embodiment of his dream, and lives happily ever after, or not.

Essential to the pattern is that the dreamer-protagonist is rewarded for doing something about his dream, for turning it from dream to reality with or without a dea ex machina. Thanks to the infinite creativity of producers, directors, and writers, Pygmalion has generated countless wonderful movie story variations: Inventor Gepetto, in Pinocchio (1940--with numerous remakes), wishes that the wooden puppet he’s created could become the son he never had; a department store window dresser (Robert Walker), in One Touch of Venus (1948, based on the Ogden Nash/S. J. Perelman musical), kisses a statue of Venus (Ava Gardner) into life— trouble begins when she falls in love with him. In 1983’s thenEducating Rita (from Willy Russell’s play), a young hairdresser (Julie Walters), wishing to improve herself by continuing her education, finds a tutor in jaded professor (Michael Caine), who’s reinvigorated by her. In a reverse of the pattern, as quickly as she changes under his tutelage he resents the “educated” Rita and wants her, selfishly, to stay as she was.

Alvin Johnson (Nick Cannon), in 2003’s Love Don’t Cost a Thing, a remake of Can’t Buy Me Love (1987), comes to the rescue of Paris (Christina Milian) when she wrecks her mother’s Cadillac and can’t pay the $1,500 for the repair. Alvin fronts the cash with his savings and, in return, Paris has to pretend to be his girlfriend for two weeks; Alvin becomes “cool” for the first time in his life, but learns that the price of popularity is higher than he bargained for. In She’s All That (1999), the pattern is reversed as Freddie Prinze, Jr., is a high school hotttie who bets a classmate he can turn nerdy Rachel Leigh Cook into a prom queen but, of course, runs into trouble when he falls in love with his creation. In The Princess Diaries (2001), Mia (Anne Hathaway), a gawky Bay Area teen, learns her father was the prince of Genovia; the queen (Julie Andrews) hopes her granddaughter will take her father’s rightful place as heir, and transforms her from a social misfit into a regal lady but discover their growing love for each other is more important than the throne.

Pretty Woman (1990) is my second favorite example of the tirelessness of the Pygmalion myth. Taking the flower-girl motif of My Fair Lady to the extreme, Vivian (Julia Roberts) is a prostitute (albeit idealized) and Edward (Richard Gere) a ruthless businessman with no time for real love. As he opens his credit cards on a Rodeo Drive shopping spree, we experience a telescoped transformation-by-money accompanied with the upbeat music that reminds us that we love this highly escapist part of the Pygmalion story, the actual process of turning ugly duckling into princess swan.

My favorite example is La Femme Nikita (remade as Point of No Return, 1993, with Bridget Fonda), because it shows the versatility of mythic structure, taking Pygmalion to the darkest place imaginable as it fashions of street druggie Nikita (Anne Parillaud), under Bob’s merciless tutelage (Tcheky Karyo), a chameleon-like lethal sophisticate whose heart of gold allows her to escape both her unformed past and her darkly re-formed present.

So popular is the Pygmalion myth with audiences that it crops up in the most unlikely places. In Pao zhi nu peng you (My Dream Girl, 2003), Shanghai slum-dweller Cheung Ling (Vicki Zhao) is thrust into high society when she encounters her long-lost father, who hires Joe Lam to makeover his daughter to fit her new status. In Million-Dollar Baby (2004), the unformed matter (Hilary Swank) reports for duty and demands to be transformed. Instead of falling in love, the boxing instructor (Clint Eastwood) is reborn, reinvigorated, re-inspired, learns to feel again—thereby revealing the underlying emotion that drives the Pygmalion myth for both protagonist and the character he reshapes: rebirth into a more ideal state of being.

A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT - Part One

From How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity

Chapter Thirteen:

Perfecting Your Craft

Nothing takes the place of practice. A famous athlete once said, “If you’re not practicing, someone out there is practicing. And when he meets you he will beat you.” Writing isn’t just a talent, it’s a craft that requires the honing of skill and technique. In this chapter I’ll give you several concrete suggestions about how you can improve yourself as a commercial novelist.

A novelist’s toolkit

A novelist’s medium is story, his form the contemporary novel. His most basic tools are character, action, setting and narrative voice. From the alchemy created by mixing these, a story emerges. Let’s examine each of these elements in turn.

Major, minor, and supporting characters

Character is by far the most important element of a novel. To the extent that your readers are “on board” with your protagonist, they will stay committed to your story. An unforgettable protagonist, even if he appears complex and multifaceted to the reader, is made up of just a handful of key components:

1.) Motivation: What makes your protagonist tick? What does he want? Your character must be struggling with one of the major human drives, including love, hate, fear, anxiety, vengeance, rage, jealousy, ambition, and greed. Your readers know these drives intimately; odds are, they’ve grappled with them in their own lives. They’ll respond to them.

Identify one drove for each of your characters and develop it. The best stories take a single, profound emotion and plumb its depths through all the characters like variations on a theme in music; the worst stories skim the surface of many different human drives, leaving their readers lost, confused, and unsatisfied. A well-constructed protagonist may possess two drives that are in conflict with each other, but rarely more than this. He is driven by greed and fear, for example, so that each step toward his goal of riches increases his psychological pain. In real life, people run a gamut of emotions, explore many drives, but not in well-made fiction. The beauty of the “what if” pattern (“What if a man driven by greed was as strongly driven by fear?”) is that it allows us to isolate and explore the ramifications of action issuing from such a character.

2.) Mission: Your protagonist needs a job to do, a goal for his drive. If it’s greed you’ve chosen, you may want to be the man who aims at being the top player on Wall Street, the woman who corners the oil exploration business, the couple who want to have more than anyone else at their country club. It doesn’t matter whether the character chooses to undertake the mission himself, or it’s thrust upon him. The mission should relate directly, in one way or another, to the character’s motivation.

The mission must be involved enough and challenging enough to sustain the story for the duration of the novel. It must lend itself to challenges, both in the form of obstacles, and in the form of an antagonist.

An antagonist, by definition, is a force that works against your hero’s mission—your protagonist’s nemesis. Your antagonist will not necessarily be a bad guy—he might not even be a person at all. In Sebastian Junger’s novel The Perfect Storm, nature is the antagonist. It’s the storm itself that foils Captain Billy Tyne’s mission to come home with a boatload of swordfish. In Steve Alten’s Domain, the antagonist is the other-worldly dragon creature who rises from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico after lying dormant for millions of years.

3.) Obstacles: Action happens when your hero struggles against obstacles to his mission. The obstacles you choose to confront your protagonist must be appropriate for him—don’t pit Bambi against the Galactic Empire. Arrange your series of obstacles in ascending order, so that the tension rises throughout your story. Your obstacles, ideally, should relate to one another in some fashion. And like all the other elements of your story, they must have a beginning, middle, and end.

4.) Relatability: If your audience can’t identify with your protagonist, they’re not going to be able to involve themselves in your story. Beginning writers often get the impression that a protagonist has to be likable. But if that were the case, we couldn’t enjoy Bill Murray’s performance as the irascible Frank Cross in Scrooged. Readers don’t have to like your protagonist. They just have to relate to him. They have to see the direction you’re pointing him in, and root for him to go there. If he’s a jerk, the audience must hunger for his redemption. You can’t help rooting for Hero’s Bernie LaPlante, even if you do want to kick him.

5.) Change: Over the course of the story, your protagonist must face his shortcoming, or his fear, or whatever it is that’s really keeping him from achieving his mission. He must grow into his ability to meet the goal you’ve set for him. In real life, human change is nebulous, messy, imprecise. In fiction, it can’t be. Your character’s change must progress in a logical, clear series of steps. See Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing for a thorough discussion of the steps that lead a character from state A to state B.

To be continued. Check back soon!

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