The Woman in the Story
Page 11
Wider Culture: It’s a culture where thirty-something women are trying to find love, and it’s not easy!
Community: Amanda’s community is driven and workaholic Hollywood where it is easy to let work take over your life. Iris works as a newspaper wedding columnist, reminding herself on a daily basis of her single status.
Family: Iris’ brother Graham has lost his wife and is clearly lonely. His family group is sad and lonely. Amanda suffers the loneliness of her own broken family. Elderly Arthur who Iris helps is a lonely widower.
Identity: Iris’s and Amanda’s problems result in them both being alone for the holidays and, potentially, single women throughout their lives.
The Metaphoric Wound of loneliness is healed by both heroines facing their emotional issues. This links to the theme of The Holiday, which could be described as “loneliness ends when you deal with your issues.” Iris could have continued being controlled by Jasper, but the guidance of Arthur and a new friend in Miles helps her move on. Amanda could have continued to throw herself into work and continue a string of bad affairs, but Graham and his daughters show her how to be brave and open up.
The Metaphoric Wound and Theme
In both films you can see that the Metaphoric Wound, stemming from the heroines’ deepest inner Conflicts, is reflected in all levels of the story’s world. I’ve shown how the theme is your particular philosophical interpretation of the Metaphoric Wound. Your story, including every character and every scene, should reflect an aspect of your theme. Remember the Metaphoric Wound is only one way of finding your theme. We all have our own processes. You might be a writer for whom a certain theme is your very first motivating factor to write the story.
Back to the Story Type
Now that you’ve thought through your Metaphoric Wound and your theme, go back and take another look at the heroine story types. You’ve done a great deal of thinking about what is going on for your heroine on a deep level, so one of the story types might feel a great deal more resonant for you.
In All About My Mother, Manuela is on a Path to Wholeness heroine story type.
In The Holiday, Amanda and Iris are also on a Path to Wholeness heroine story type.
This is the heroine story type when the female character is stuck in her life because of internal issues. The story makes her deal with these.
Tips for Writing the Metaphoric Wound
Don’t Panic!
If you can’t work out what the Metaphoric Wound is at first, remain calm. The more you work on your heroine’s internal Conflicts, the more you will be able to find it.
Be Brave…and Honest!
Your story and its theme are always going to be deeply influenced by your own philosophies about life, which are drawn from your own life experiences. If you can think about your own Internal Wounds and Gifts, you might be able to see the Metaphoric Wound in your own life. We all have them, and we usually get a sense of them when we come up against the same patterns in life and relationships. If you don’t heal them, they can reflect in the stories you are choosing to write. You could say that we writers write best that which we need to heal.
The funny thing is, when you’ve resolved certain Conflicts in your own life, your story choices tend to change. If you can see this happening, this is truly conscious screenwriting Another good thing to do is watch movies: try to work out the Wounds and Gifts of the main character. Also try to see what heroine story type they might be following.
Minor Characters
Remember they have an important function, which is to reflect your theme and that alone. If they aren’t doing that, then either cut them or help them become more relevant.
EXERCISE: YOUR HEROINE’S GIFTS AND WOUNDS QUESTIONNAIRE
To get you started, complete Your Heroine’s Gifts and Wounds questionnaire, again from your heroine’s point of view. If you want to work on your conscious screenwriting, then you could always fill it out from your point of view too!
YOUR HEROINE’S GIFTS AND WOUNDS QUESTIONNAIRE
1. What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?
2. How does it make you feel now?
3. How do you cope with it?
4. Are there any people in your life who make you feel bad about yourself? Why?
5. How do you behave when you are around people who make you feel bad about yourself?
6. How would you like to change your behavior toward them?
7. How do you make yourself feel good?
8. Who makes you feel good about yourself?
9. What kind of relationship would you like to develop with people who make you feel good?
10. If you could make a wish, what would it be?
A PHASE
SHE's GOING THROUGH
Chapter 5
It’s now time to focus on building your heroine’s story. I’d like to introduce you to the concept of the phase as a building block of the story type. By using phases you will also be able to develop your character and theme and support your structure.
A phase is a moment or duration of time in the story
when your heroine has experiences or makes decisions
that affect her identity.
Phases are a new way of looking at stories and how to build them. Because they are related to your heroine’s identity, they explore what she is doing in the story at any given moment. The best way of describing them is the substance of identity. They basically deal with your character’s subjectivity throughout the story. That’s why they can come in any order you like.
It might help to think of a phase like the phase of the moon, which transmits a different energy. In the same way, a phase in your heroine’s journey is a moment or duration of narrative time with a particular energy. A phase is not a stage, because they don’t have to go in any order.
How you as a writer experience each phase is shaped by the Superthemes influencing you, your heroine’s character and role choices at any given moment, the heroine story type you’ve chosen, and the theme and Metaphoric Wound you are exploring. Phases can bring a great deal together. Ultimately, how your heroine will experience each phase is shaped by her unique character. She might be identifying with a certain role choice, but a phase will show how she’s relating to it, when she is, and what she does with it. You’ll see this as you get to know each phase. The phases can be categorized in three groups:
IDENTITY PHASES RELATING PHASES MOMENTUM PHASES
Transition Self-Relegation Violation
Maternal Lessons Desire for Union Crossroads
Father Distance Loving Too Much Eruption
Adornment Retreat Path to Potential
THE PHASES AND THEME
Thinking through each phase and its effect on your heroine can help you develop your theme better. This is because phases ask you to question your stance on certain issues. Phases deal with your heroine’s identity and the many choices she will make as a girl or a woman. These can include sexuality, gender issues, motherhood, marriage and divorce, work, loss, aging, relationships, and the female body. You’ll be having insights about these areas that feel real for your heroine, and these might inspire your story’s theme.
For instance, in Sex and the City: The Movie, Carrie spends a long time in the Retreat phase. During this time, she is able to work out her contribution to her and Big’s disastrous wedding, which reflects the theme of the film. I believe the theme of Sex and the City: The Movie is something along the lines of “True love requires self-truth.” All the characters in the film have to deal with their denial of what they are doing wrong, which is damaging either their relationships or their identity For heroine Carrie, she needs to work it out in the Retreat phase, which I will describe a bit later.
A phase energizes the story and takes on a unique form because of several unique factors that only you control. These factors are your heroine’s personality, emotional wounds, culture, and opportunities and challenges. As you get to know each phase, use them to inspire your own
interpretation of how your heroine might relate to them and decide where in the story they might work. You will also be able to increasingly recognize them in films and shows that you watch.
PHASES AND STRUCTURE
The phases are truly flexible, and there’s absolutely no prescriptive ways when it comes to using them. Each heroine’s story reflects them in completely different ways. They are not blueprints for structure. Phases complement any structure of screenplay you use, whether it’s the classic linear structure, a “complex” linear structure (where the narrative unfolds in two or three different linear story lines), an art-house nonlinear structure, or even a circular structure.
I can’t really emphasize their flexibility enough. First imagine your structure as the loom. Then imagine the phases as strands of thread that weave through your screenplay. Just as in a tapestry, certain colors of thread will be stronger in certain sections and weaker in others. The colors might disappear for a while, only to come back later. Some threads you can see in the background running evenly all the way through. Some phases just might not feel right for your story. They might work better as aids to help you develop the backstory of your heroine (all her life experience until the story begins).
Now let’s look at each group of phases in more detail. You can use them to help you structure your story by mapping which phases feel right for each act. But as you get to know and use them, you’ll find that they become alive.
THE IDENTITY PHASES
The Identity phases reflect the moments in the story that are concerned with your heroine’s changing identity. It’s where she’s dealing with her direction in life, the things getting in the way of finding herself, and the image she presents to herself and the world.
The Identity Phases are Transition, Maternal Lessons, Father Distance, and Adornment:
The Transition phase reflects your heroine’s initiation of change in her story
The Maternal Lessons phase shows your heroine dealing with her values about being a woman.
The Father Distance phase shows your heroine dealing with issues about men and masculinity.
The Adornment phase concerns your heroine relating to her own physical being and self-esteem issues.
Transition
All heroines want a change, even if this need is not consciously recognized by them. Changes can be chosen, enforced, or even coincidental. It can be brought on by one of women’s many physical changes through life, menstruation, ovulation, pregnancy, birth, menopause, and aging. In your story, the Transition phase is when your heroine is in freefall having taken the plunge, whether she is pushed or she jumped. It is the period of time when she endures the loss of the old and anticipates the new. It signifies a fundamental change of direction.
On a psychological level, your heroine may be ready for change or totally unprepared for it. Or she could be somewhere in between the two, of two minds and hesitant. A heroine may be feeling confident, vulnerable, or even terrified at the unknown quantity of the prospects ahead. In the Transition phase, a heroine tends to be out of her depth, but there is absolutely no going back Your heroine may have walked out on a marriage, started a new job, decided to commit suicide, or got pregnant. There is a general feeling of release in this stage, like a leap of faith. The point is your heroine is on the verge of a new life, which will change her in a way she doesn’t yet know Your heroine may start her journey in Transition at the beginning of your story, similar to so many heroines in films. In Mona Lisa Smile, Katharine Ann arrives at Wellesley College not knowing what to expect but she’s full of motivation. Alternatively, Transition might occur much farther along in her journey, or even at the end. It can also reoccur several times during the course of your narrative, at any point she has to move on and out.
Sometimes water can literally symbolize Transition on a heroine’s journey. In Villa Amalia, the heroine drifts in the sea, not moving or drowning, until she is saved by a young Italian couple. The Piano uses the sea to symbolize transition in the emotional life of heroine Ada. Water is the replenishing source of life, but it can take life away just as easily. Like Ada, your heroine might have to make the choice to sink or swim at this point in her journey.
Maternal Lessons
Every woman “deals” with being a woman every day of her life, whether this is conscious or unconscious. All women have issues about being a woman — angry, happy, contented, frustrated, and complicated; you name it, your heroine will have experienced it at some point in her life. Your heroine might not even be aware of some of the baggage about her sex and gender that she might be carrying around. She might be totally unconscious of a deep underlying rage with men. She might completely identify with men and shun any conventional notions of femininity, or be a tomboy, butch lesbian, or transvestite.
Maternal Lessons represent the mother/daughter relationship. As women in Western culture mainly do the lion’s share of the childrearing, the mother is normally the first relationship for a baby. The mother looms large in a baby’s early life, an omnipotent force. She is a goddess-like being on which her daughter is completely dependent for survival. Some adult women feel they cannot ever achieve distance from their mother, no matter what they do. Where a boy can more easily separate from his mother because he has a male father and masculine culture to welcome him, the girl has to accept that she will become like her mother, who she is trying to individuate from. You can see this seemingly unbreakable bond in mother-daughter relationships, even the bad ones.
A mother is a girl’s strongest and most powerful role model, who wittingly or unwittingly transmits powerful messages about being female. Your heroine lives those messages, either by rejecting them or embracing them. If your heroine is a mother, she will be giving her own maternal lessons to her children. Many women consciously do everything possible to not turn into their mothers. But if your heroine has a close and loving relationship to her mother, it will be harder for her to resist identification with her mothers’ values, whatever they are. This can include resentment of the father in the family. Mothers, because they do so much of the nurturing, tend to set the standard for emotional literacy in the family If a mother is immature, then her daughter’s struggles to express herself will be harder.
Power Corrupts
By the very nature of the role of mother, women have a great deal of power in the family. For some women, it’s the only place they do have power. The family unit is her territory and her property, and she can defend this and wage war for the rest of her life. This can lead to the high sense of betrayal and abandonment issues women feel after a divorce, even if they sought the divorce. It can also make women feel their ex is still their property, despite decree absolute.
So how do Maternal Lessons function as a phase in your story? They pretty much boil down to one premise: what being a woman means to your heroine. What if she didn’t have a mother? Well, that’s a lesson in itself, one all about loss. Unhelpful lessons that your heroine might believe can take this form:
Women’s lives are hard.
Women should be looked after by men.
Women should put their needs second and put others first.
Women are rivals to each other for male attention.
Women shouldn’t trust men.
Women have to be beautiful to get ahead.
Don’t explore your body.
If you eat that you’ll get fat.
If you form a relationship with your father’s new partner you are being disloyal to me.
Women should stick together.
Keep young and beautiful.
Although helpful lessons can look like this:
Women can be independent.
Women have a right to childcare.
Men can be as good a parent as a woman.
Women’s aging processes are beautiful.
This is what you should understand about your body….
Women should be clear about all their needs, emotional, sexual, professional, and so forth.
You are going to have a happy and fulfilling life!
Over the course of your heroine’s story, she will gradually arrive at a point where these lessons can be challenged in some way. She will abandon them, defend them, or at the very least have a major rethink. This phase will appear in your screenplay, when a heroine is confronted with or acts out her internalized values about being a woman, whether she’s doing it consciously or unconsciously. Very often, by the end, she will unlearn them. Check out the three heroine/daughters in French film L’enfer (Hell) whose whole lives have been damaged by the irrational campaign of hate that their mother has for their father (who turns out to be not so bad after all).
Self-Image
In The Devil Wears Prada Andrea starts her journey not particularly image conscious and with a bunch of good friends, male and female. Her encounter with fashion guru Miranda forces her to adopt the nasty values of high fashion where women are cold and ruthless, showing little support to each other. Some heroines have an inner rivalry with other women. She’s the compulsive perfectionist who always looks good, the kind of woman who can bring out a sense of inferiority in other women. Scarlett O’Hara is queen of this tribe. Carrie Bradshaw comes a close second in the style department, but her outer fashion confidence partly masks her inner insecurities. Elle in Legally Blonde has helpful and unhelpful Maternal Lessons. Utterly superficial and defined by her looks, Elle has a loving mom who is a little shallow. But deep down, Elle trusts women. Elle’s Maternal Lessons come in the form of entitlement for being blonde and beautiful. She’s been taught Maternal Lessons such as women are her friends and women should look good to land an Alpha-male husband. These lessons form a powerful phase in the first half of the film but are quickly unlearned later at Harvard.