Been laying low on the blog front for the past few weeks cause lots of stuff is on the plate. All exciting. Lots good. Challenges galore. Hey, it’s life – and while there have been many times in the past when I felt a bit numb, as if days were “just passing” in uneventful, unremarkable ways, this certainly has changed for me. It’s pedal to the metal at this point of my life and in that mindset I am finding more fulfillment than ever before.

Weird how, like a magnet, I have always been drawn to people who find deep meaning in (and hold great passion for) their work. My best teachers always reflected that. The people I idolized as a kid always seemed to represent this. And though it’s taken me way, way longer than I ever would have imagined to “get comfortable in my own skin” the dawn of this phenomenon is upon me. The older I get, the shorter life seems, yet the richer and more wonderful, too. No one is exempt from pain in this world but freeing myself from self-inflicted pain and having stopped being my own worst adversary really has helped me a ton.

It’s a skill I wish someone would have taught me a long, long time ago. (Oh Common Core, the shortcomings you have.)

Indeed I am reading, reading, reading all the time but the thing about all the reading I am doing is that it never feels like I am getting the chance to read enough. (I even wonder if I get to write enough, which is another reason I have pulled back on blogging so prolifically. I was cranking 5,000 blog words a week there for almost two years… but I think that ship is sailing for me. The deeper writing of constructing meaningful stories for young readers beckons more than any other type of writing right now and with so many hours in the day, one must make choices, right?)

Family, literature, friends, yoga, good food, meaningful work, an occasional glass of wine and travel. The math of my mid-life is adding up to these things. Low key yet rewarding. Simple, for the first time ever, suffices. More than suffices, actually. Simple rocks! And the fact is, I am lucky to be able to have all that I do. (Side note: 20 years ago, I probably would have said “bo-ring”. Nowadays, exotic seems way over-rated.)

Yesterday I said that when you build relationships with people, when you build friendships, you start to learn things about folks that not everyone else gets to know.

And as a result, you become more intimate.

Then I asked you to think about your own close friends. Do you not know something about them that many, many other people do not? And does this not make you feel closer to them in some way? More attached and more vested in their well-being.

I mean it’s one thing to know that your neighbor was once a lifeguard at the local beach. It’s another thing to know that your neighbor was once a lifeguard at the local beach who once saw a three year girl old drown in the rough surf on a day when despite all of his best efforts, he just couldn’t swim out fast enough to save her – and while he was applying CPR, this child, this toddler, this innocent, angelic, brown-eyed little package of sweetness, died in his salty arms.

See, the back story hurt builds bonds between the audience and the protagonist while better illuminating the motivation behind why the character is so driven to achieve their current outward goals.

Remember earlier when I talked about how, as a writer, the worse you hurt your hero, the better. And I also declared that the reason you want to do this is because audiences LOVE it. Well, let’s take the story of the lifeguard neighbor I just whipped up above. If I were going to tell the story, I’d bring the reader right into the heart of his experience. They would live his anguish. The physical fight against the rough waves of the ocean knowing that a three year old girl is drowning and it’s your job, your duty, your professional and moral responsibility to save her.

But you fail. This girl dies in your arms. Sand in your protagonist’s face. Heartbreak in her mother’s eyes. Guilt in your soul that you couldn’t swim faster, you didn’t train harder, you weren’t more alert before this girl fell into the beach’s danger zone of rough waves and a big undertow. Mr. Lifeguard, that was your job, her family, her mother, the community was counting on you and you failed. The result of your failure is that a child is dead. Now how are you going to live with that?

Ouch, right? I mean, this hero is crushed. And you, even reading this right now, are probably also hurt and wildly sympathetic to the pain in this hero’s heart.

As a writer, that’s just where I want you. Why? Because, is this story over? Of course not!

There’s been an accident. A boat filled with eight year old girls at Ocean Camp has capsized. Five children are stranded and the swells are rising. There’s only one person who can make it to the breakers: your neighbor. And though he hasn’t patrolled a beach in years and he’s given up being a lifeguard, given up thinking he’s got any value to this world at all, he knows this is no time for self-pity. It’s not a question of can he save these young girls; the fact is, he must.

It’s why he’s been training for triathlons all these years. Ever since that young girl’s death, instead of letting his body go soft, he’s been torturing his body, running marathons, biking up mountaintops, swimming through frozen, wavy waters, trying to make the guilt and hurt go away. But really, he always knew deep in his heart that at some point in his life, he’d be called yet again to save another human being. It’s what he was born to do. It’s why his body is now carved like a piece of steel and his grit is as resolved as any Greek hero from the heights of Mount Olympus.

Those innocent little eight-year old girls, the ones with freckles and the puppy dogs and pigtails and the math homework, the innocent little ocean campers that are going to die unless our hero rises to the occasion. Well, they’re not going to die because our hero has just re-discovered his life’s purpose…

He must save Ocean Camp!

(I know, I know, I better be careful before some slick Hollywood agent gives me a call and says, “So tell me, who’s got the rights to this little Ocean Camp project? I’m thinking Brad Pitt.)

Audiences love to see and feel the hero’s hurt because they love to see and feel the hero’s triumph. Pain and glory are tied at the hip. The worse the hurt, the lower the hero sinks, and then the higher the inevitable ascendancy. Besides, everyone in the audience knows what deep hurt feels like in their own lives so when they see a hurt hero rise like a Phoenix from the ashes the message to them that they take is, “And so will I.”

Hope is the heartbeat of humanity. Great stories, at least the kind that I strive to write, stand of this fulcrum. As a writer, yours can, too.

In my last post, I talked about how I am of the belief that over the course of a good story, the protagonist will experience 4 primary hurts.

1. Their current hurt.
2. A fresh hurt.
3. The back story hurt.
4. The healed hurt.

Let’s look at #1: The Current Hurt

What I mean by the current hurt is that stories begin with a character in a setting, a scene, a place, a locale, whatever. But this is not just a physical place; this is an emotional place for the character is well.

And something is wrong. Amiss. Their life already has a problem, an issue. In a romantic comedy, perhaps it’s the tried and true “unlucky in love” phenomenon. In a spy thriller, perhaps it’s the classic “the bad guys are out there” sentiment. Each genre has its predicament; the dilemma is not the point. The point is that the protagonist is already living in a broken world when the story begins and it is a world which is somehow bringing pain to the hero’s life. The hero might be battling this force, they might be burying their head in the sand denying that this force exists, they might be the very cause of this painful force, or they might be entirely powerless to do something about this force (or so they think), but either way, when a good story begins, one essential characteristic is that the hero’s world is marked by pain.

And this pain is shaping the current life of the protagonist.

Let’s look at a few examples. In The Hunger Games, Katniss is a young girl who is forced to illegally hunt in order to feed her fatherless, practically starving to death family. While the government “haves” have plenty, the “have-nots” in society (especially in her realm of society) are living in an almost hand-to-mouth type of fashion. If Katniss doesn’t bring home food, her younger sister, the shining light of her life, doesn’t eat. Powerful stuff for sure. But also indicative of my theory on “The Current Hurt”. Katniss lives an oppressed life. The powers that be – unconquerable, unquestionable, savage, unfeeling powers – have created dire, painful circumstances in Katniss’s life and this pain is a driving, defining force which quite literally forges her character.

How about the classic novel Animal Farm? When the book opens, the oppression of mankind – the current hurt – creates a world of suffering for the animals, the protagonists of Orwell’s book.

How about Shakespeare’s Hamlet? King Hamlet is dead, Prince Hamlet is living with an uncle who is sleeping with his mother while enemies plan to invade from lands far away and the prince, our hero, is distraught, discombobulated, and doesn’t know what to do about any of it.

All before Act I Scene I even begins. Talk about a guy who is living in a world of hurt.

In my book Cinder-Smella our hero is being treated like a rented mule by her evil stepfamily.

In my book Homeboyz, streets gangs have brought chaos, violence and a type of asocial anarchy to the local neighborhood, bringing pain to all those who live in the area. In my bookNerd Girls, the pretty, popular “perfect” girls tyrannically torment the schoolyard “have-nots”. Nerd pain provides these girls with entertainment.

Indeed, stories open with a protagonist living in a current world of hurt before we even really get to meet them.

And then it gets worse. (BTW, you’re probably intrigued by that idea right now, the idea that, “It’s already bad, and then it gets worse? Oh my God, how?” That’s the natural reaction of any audience to this notion, very much the nest principle I am about to illuminate at work.)