Something You CAN Do
Stomping on the Puppy
Let’s Talk About Heart
To be honest I’ve been stalling on this post. It goes to a place where I just do not look good. Picture the bronze office tower of NBC Universal looming over the San Fernando Valley: computerized elevators whisk you to only the floor where your meeting is, only moments before the meeting is scheduled. You pitch to acquisition people who aren’t movie stars because, apparently, they’re too good looking to be movie stars. I was pitching with a seasoned show runner who’d worked on X Files and Breaking Bad and Fargo. Our concept for a proposed new show seemed to be well received. Big Table Situation. Outside the windows, the 101 Freeway trickling by in both directions. I’m a player.
Then my co-creator assured the room, “Our idea has plenty of heart.”
I knew the term, I’d just never heard anyone say it aloud. It felt like hearing a Frenchman say, “Ooo la la!” Caught off guard, I burst out laughing. Normally I adore lingo, but “heart” struck me as so show biz, that I needed a minute to compose myself. In Minimalism the heart is the LAST thing you stumble upon. Tom Spanbauer preached: You’re writing to discover the narrator’s broken heart… the nature of the broken heart... the moment after which everything in the narrator’s life is forever changed.
Once you know the nature of the broken heart, only then do you rewrite the book five, six, eight more times.
Now at NBC we were supposed to know the broken heart right up front. There was no way a studio/network was going to give us millions of dollars to discover the nature of a character’s broken heart. My helpless laughter busted out when I recognized the chasm between writing a short story and writing for a television series. People at that table just stared at me. My partner in the project was hating me with his eyes. There was no way I could tell these slick, beautiful executives, “No, we need your giant boatloads of money first! We’ll get back to you about the broken heart!”
The meeting wrapped up fast. The end.
That was my introduction to the pre-fab broken heart. The death of John Wick’s puppy. The cancer of Walter White in Breaking Bad. The illness of everyone in a Jodi Picoult or Nicholas Sparks novel. The pre-fab broken heart must communicate to a vast audience in an elevator pitch. I just can’t do that, and that explains my poverty and obscurity.
Can you imagine telling the executives at NBC, “It’s about a young man who fakes terminal illnesses until he meets a young woman who’s also fake dying, and their mutual inauthentic humanity makes them destined for one another.” Only Michel Foucault would love that pitch, but he doesn’t dole out money at a television studio. Silly me.
Like I said, my co-creator didn’t appreciate what seemed to be derision on my part, and the project fell apart. But let that be our introduction to “heart.”
“Heart” is what I call Emotional Authority or Heart Authority. It’s how you enroll the reader through his/her emotions. I’ll venture that emotional authority is the reigning (only) authority in the culture right now. Tell anyone some facts and figures they don’t already want to believe and they’ll ask, “What’s your source?” But if you enroll their emotions, they can’t argue with the effect you’ve generated. You’ve made them laugh or cry or gasp in shocked realization. All the Wikipedia crap you can pump into your story is never going to earn you as much authority in the reader’s mind as one puppy getting stomped.
I’m always going to insist that the Problem is the toughest aspect of a story to get. If you know the Problem, the solution is clear sailing. Rosemary Woodhouse got raped by the Devil. Okay, now we know where we stand so the solution is easy-peasy. Inventing a great problem is most of the work in fiction, but I’ll also tell you that inventing a good Heart is the other hardest thing to do. “It’s about a young man who fakes choking in public so strangers embrace, nurture, and bond with him.” Yeah, no, NBC is never going to fund that.
Now, realize that the oddball, quirky thing you’re doing… you’re doing it now to establish your place in the culture. Yeah, that Solid Gold idea you’re hatching in secret. Once you’re known for the strange, fresh thing you suddenly executed and that caught the right eyes… then you can pitch them a puppy getting stomped on and ride that money-pony through theaters for the rest of your life.
This ramble also takes us back to Tom’s advice about writing from your own unrealized broken heart. If you can write about it from the get-go, the broken heart is just not that raw or fresh. It’s so stale that most likely you’ll never finish writing the first draft. It’s a stomped-on beagle puppy. It’s a girlfriend with leukemia. Yawn. Big Yawn.
Which Brings Us to…
Animal House, the movie. You thought I would never ask, but what was the Heart in Animal House? In the midst of all those antics and sight gags and cringe moments, what is the Stomped-On Puppy? It stands out like a sore thumb.
As promised, the first right answer in the Comments will get the $500 Folio Society edition of The Great Gatsby, but only if that winner can get the book via UPS in the United States. I’m not shipping this book overseas and getting it lost in Customs.
Which Brings Us to…
The book pictured above, The Hunger by Whitley Streiber. I found my copy used for four bucks. If you want to spend your money don’t subscribe to my Substack, instead hunt up a paperback of The Hunger. Read it and watch the David Bowie movie. To do so is a crash course in “heart” and how it does and doesn’t work right. In a few weeks we can hash out this distinction using The Hunger as our vehicle. For now, dig up the 1981 book. Watch the movie.
Oh, and Slush Pile is tomorrow night. Come while you can. The summer heat means Salon Rouge needs to run its air conditioning, and the hum conflicts with storytelling. We’ll probably take a hiatus for a few weeks until the weather cools down.
Please, also check out the new Substack of Amanda Knox, here.
Just off the cuff, I want to say that the Heart is Boon and Katy, and the Broken Heart is Boon discovering her affair with Prof. Jennings. There are other examples of cheating in the movie that act as gags, whereas their scene reads as sincere (same with their reunion at the Parade, only to be undercut by their title card). They occupy a romantic drama entirely seperate from the rest of the movie.
What was the Heart in "Animal House": Delta Tau Chi House represented the underdogs, the less privileged, the less-than-perfect . Throughout the movie there was a theme of Delta Chi House members being put in their place by Omega Theta Pi. Right off, the Omega Theta Pi rejected Larry and Kent without even talking to them. Larry and Kent head to Delta Tau Chi where they were immediately accepted and find a place. They had no chance or no place at Omega Theta Pi. The theme repeats throughout the movie in various ways and comes to a head when Delta Tau Chi House lose everything so they had nothing to lose and decided to make a sort of Project Mayhem to balance the scales. The Delta Tau Chi House created a sort of liminal space when the group crashed the Annual Homecoming Parade. By crashing the Annual Homecoming Parade, the group shuts down social norms and hierarchy and reclaim their own authority for a few hours.