The Hero’s Greatest Fear – Laurie Scheer
Laurie is the director of the Annual Writer’s Institute that’s offered by the University of Wisconsin, Division of Continuing Studies in Madison. She has good credentials in both television and movies. Perhaps more important, she is what a Mentor should be, honest (and critical) while still affirming the writer as a person and encouraging his or her creative efforts. If you, dear readers, are lucky enough to find such a person it will behoove you to cultivate him or her as a friend and Mentor. You can go here to learn more about UW writers programs.
On the “Tools” page I mentioned Laurie’s two questions. There’s a story behind her first question and it goes like this . . .
Laurie is known to say, “I should be able to walk into a room where you are writing and interrupt you by asking, ‘What is the Hero’s greatest fear?’ and there shouldn’t be any hesitation in giving me the answer. Not only that, but you should be able to tell me how the sentences you just wrote relate to the Hero’s greatest fear.”
On my good days I can do that. On my bad days I can’t – that’s probably one of the reasons I have a bad day now and then.
Her second question certainly isn’t unique to her. In fact it seems to be almost universal, at least in the universe of writing gurus I have studied, “What happens two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the story that forces the Hero to confront her fear directly?” That scene (or chapter) is the reason to tell the story in the first place. Everything that comes before it should lead up to it and everything thereafter should be profoundly influenced by what has happened there.
We live in a complicated world and our interconnectedness and the flood of available information keeps making it more and more complicated. Sometimes getting where we want to go demands that we strip away the complexities and ask ourselves the simple questions:
1) What does the Hero fear more than anything else?
2) How do the events of my story drive him/her inexorably toward a confrontation with that fear?
You don’t have to hit your reader or viewer over the head with it, you don't have to spell it out for them in detail, but if you as a writer can’t answer those questions, I’ll bet your story is having problems.
On the “Tools” page I mentioned Laurie’s two questions. There’s a story behind her first question and it goes like this . . .
Laurie is known to say, “I should be able to walk into a room where you are writing and interrupt you by asking, ‘What is the Hero’s greatest fear?’ and there shouldn’t be any hesitation in giving me the answer. Not only that, but you should be able to tell me how the sentences you just wrote relate to the Hero’s greatest fear.”
On my good days I can do that. On my bad days I can’t – that’s probably one of the reasons I have a bad day now and then.
Her second question certainly isn’t unique to her. In fact it seems to be almost universal, at least in the universe of writing gurus I have studied, “What happens two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the story that forces the Hero to confront her fear directly?” That scene (or chapter) is the reason to tell the story in the first place. Everything that comes before it should lead up to it and everything thereafter should be profoundly influenced by what has happened there.
We live in a complicated world and our interconnectedness and the flood of available information keeps making it more and more complicated. Sometimes getting where we want to go demands that we strip away the complexities and ask ourselves the simple questions:
1) What does the Hero fear more than anything else?
2) How do the events of my story drive him/her inexorably toward a confrontation with that fear?
You don’t have to hit your reader or viewer over the head with it, you don't have to spell it out for them in detail, but if you as a writer can’t answer those questions, I’ll bet your story is having problems.