How to choose a story? You’ve probably been told to write what you know about, right? Wrong! George Lucas never traveled to outer space, yet his original story, Star Wars, did rather well. I am often asked by clients and the Way of Story workshop participants, how to choose which story to write. The important guiding line is to choose a story you have a strong emotional connection with. Generally speaking, people go to movies or read in order to feel.
We have today become conditioned, even educated, to think and not to feel. This creates an imbalance both personally and collectively. Consequently, appropriate and inappropriate venues are sought to allow feeling. Reading a book or seeing a movie is an appropriate outlet for this. There is a varied smorgasbord as one can choose a story to feel anger, terror, a sense of power, sexual titillation, romantic love, and so on. Anthony Minghella, director of Oscar winner The English Patient, says, “I want to feel in film.” So know thyself and you will know what to write about. By this, I simply mean, know what moves you. Child abuse? Political or corporate corruption? The triumph of the human spirit in a hopeless situation? Two unlikely lovers? A search for God?
If the writer chooses a story he feels strongly about, that will be felt, in turn, by the reader or audience. Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the book Seabiscuit, suffered several years from chronic fatigue syndrome. She kept on writing and instilled all her feelings of being held down by outer circumstances into the completion of the book. Hence, her own state paralleled the theme of her best- selling book. She had to overcome this condition to complete a book she was struggling to write. She infused the story with her own struggle. The book was called Seabiscuit, a true story of three men living during the Depression in America, and their triumph against great odds. Audiences relate to such a life struggle as much now as then. It is contagious. The book became a best seller and was adapted into a major film that received seven Oscar nominations.
Stories written by formulas rarely move us, and consequently fail. They are too generic, not about specific people. This is why true stories are so popular. Knowing the story is true, that it really happened to someone, means it could happen to you. Also, choosing a story that moves you will provide your point of view (POV), so important in a great story. Your perspective becomes a unique voice, mirroring your personal relationship to the material — in other words, how you feel about your characters, story, and theme. In this way, the philosophy and values of the author are revealed through his or her story — regardless of the subject matter. Though the story need not be the details of the writer’s own life, the emotional investment in the subject or character will be felt to be real. Emotions derived from all we have lived and felt passionate about become a rich well which every good writer will draw from.
For now, just remember that it is the emotional power of your story that will ultimately determine its success. As a story and script consultant, and judge for the Emmys, Oscars, and various film festivals, I have remained unmoved by convoluted plots depicting car crashes, hospitals, and murders, while being deeply moved by Oscar winner Brokeback Mountain, a simple story about two cowboys who form an unusual bond. Why is this? Outer action is not necessarily dramatic action. Dramatic action is what takes place emotionally between people.
It is not what happens in a great story that matters. Rather it is how what happens to your main character affects him and his relationships, and ultimately changes him in some vital way.
Where to find a story? There are as many answers to where to find your story as there are stories. Novelist Truman Capote had a spinster aunt who became immortalized in A Christmas Memory, later made into a television movie starring the amazing Geraldine Page. My Southern mother has found her way into at least four of my plays or films, not literally, but as a prototype for various characters. All fiction is autobiography in disguise.
I grew up in New Orleans listening to women’s stories. My grandmother would have her friends over for a quilting bee. They would sit in a circle and work on the same quilt, sewing bits and pieces of material into one enduring whole. At the same time, the women would share bits and pieces of their lives with one another which made of their friendships another kind of quilt. I can remember even now myself at the age of five or six sitting on the staircase just around the corner, unseen, mesmerized by these vibrant Southern voices. Eventually, this led to a family play, The Women of Cedar Creek. Writing an all-female cast depicting three generations of Southern women was my reply to all the plays — usually written by men — with more male roles than female. Though the starting point of the play was the actual feminine members of my own family, I pushed both character and story to extremes, leaving far behind the bare facts of my own family’s history. It is well to remember that good writing is more an impressionist painting than a literal photograph.
One idea for a play came from a secondhand bookstore, the Strand, located on the corner of Twelfth and Broadway in New York City. I was teaching playwriting at The New School University, a few blocks away from the Strand, and would habitually drop by, before or after my class, and browse. One afternoon, I found a slightly tattered copy of a small book, The Letters of Calamity Jane. Soon afterwards, I was invited to Ossabaw Island off the coast of Savannah, Georgia to write. The island was like stepping back into the early nineteenth century. No cars, only fifteen people living on an island the size of Manhattan, wild horses roamed freely, and one lone sheriff was the law on the privately owned island. There I wrote Calamity Jane, set in nineteenth-century America. The play — not the Doris Day version — has now had several productions, beginning in New York, later adapted into Calamity Jane — the musical. Both versions continue to be produced throughout America. Here I used a biographical play to explore the theme of myth and reality of the Old West. What fascinated me was the wide discrepancy between what really happened and the folk tales and dime novels about figures of the Wild West, like Calamity Jane who was an extraordinary woman far ahead of her time, but suffered from abandonment by Wild Bill Hickok and the challenges of alcoholism. Abandoned and left to raise a child alone and work in a man’s world, this story seemed pertinent to life as a woman today.
Sometimes story ideas may arise from what happens to us in our own lives. Yet, even if they don’t, they usually connect with something felt within. My first long play was about Virginia Woolf. I was still acting then and had been cast to play Virginia Woolf in the comedy, An Evening in Bloomsbury by Victoria Sullivan, produced off-Broadway in New York. Naturally I began reading everything I could find by and about Woolf in order to better portray the character. Long after the play closed, however, I was still reading about her. Then one day I just sat down and started writing a drama about her struggle with madness in a world gone mad, i.e. World War II — a story far removed from the life of this baby boomer raised in New Orleans and Texas. (Remember? Not what you know but what you feel strongly about.) I had long been fascinated by the razor’s edge between creative genius and madness: van Gogh, Nijinsky, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few. So this was the theme I chose to explore through her life. Virginia (later titled On the Edge) had the good fortune to be directed by the legendary Harold Clurman (who launched the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams). The play went on to win the National Endowment for the Arts Award, but the real reward was the emotional response from the audience. Here’s one example. After one evening’s performance, an older woman, born in Europe, approached me and was crying. She expressed how grateful she was that I had written of the Kristallnacht incident in my play. Tears filled her eyes as she held my hand tightly, and said simply, “I was there. I was there.”
A surprise came when friends would come up after a performance of the play and remark how it reminded them of me. “It’s so you,” they would say. I was puzzled. Wasn’t this a play about novelist Virginia Woolf? Then slowly I realized that though the facts of the story were quite removed from my own life, the emotional content was in some ways parallel. In other words, the story dealt with themes I felt strongly about — something friends would notice, even if the playwright did not!
Incidentally, this emotional identification with what you write applies to all genres, both fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes it is easier to express yourself in a story far removed in fact from ourselves. Sounds odd, right? Yet sometimes a character far removed