Started reading a pretty excellent book called Anatomy of a Story, by John Truby after seeing it constantly quoted in a neat YouTube series called “Lessons From the Screenplay”. Part of what made me check it out was that it focuses a lot on structure, and the bits in LFtS really resonated with the process I’d been percolating in my head about how I wanted to write something next.
That is, I *love* the NaNoWriMo stream-of-consciousness model for “shaking ideas out”, but it results in a terrible *story* because it’s just essentially a long string of pseudo-random events, and I’d never developed enough structure for the stories to be interesting or meaningful beyond whether any random event was interesting or meaningful.
Whereas my favorite stories are all a distillation of a single idea, and that idea pervades everything about the story. So about five (?) years ago, I was thinking about what I wanted to write for NaNoWriMo, and it was a story about someone who woke up in unusual circumstances, and had lost their memory (cliche so far, I know), but was face-blind.
And the whole point of this was that as they unraveled what was happening, the way they perceived other people would change. The story would start with everyone looking like those blank drawing mannequins – literally no distinguishing features, so that the audience has no distinguishing features to pull from. But then as they discover things about what is happening, they start to see everyone as representations of a celebrity that embodies that “thing” – whatever it is. But *everyone* looks like that person. It’d be kind of like Being John Malkovich, but the fact that it’s John Malkovich in the moment is a reflection of something specific, and the person changes from scene to scene. The idea was that I wanted people to be recognizable as someone, but for that someone not to really mean anything other than acting as a symbol for an idea. If this were a movie, though, it wouldn’t be like Being John Malkovich, where it’s all digital replacements. You’d have to find just a shitload of lookalikes. Different in subtle ways, but in ways you wouldn’t pick up on unless you were really observant, and even within a single scene of the main character talking to that person, the actor might change every cut.
As they circle in on things, and start piecing things together, they realize that the character elements within the celebrities that are who they’re seeing are indicative of ways in which they have interacted with the world by giving those things away. They’re too passive. They’re too agreeable. They’re too accommodating. They do this maybe in part because of their condition, but they also do it because this is what a lot of society conditions us to do – to give ourselves away to fit in, and this is essentially the extreme version of that. The character is face-blind and can’t distinguish anyone from themselves, but functionally, no one could distinguish who *they* are, either, because they have no distinct personality of their own.
At some point (and this is where things really start to escape me), the pieces of those personalities would come together, you’d grow to understand that those things are the distinctive person that this person *is*, and you’d start to get a clearer picture of who they are. And of course, in true Film Noir style the person at the center of whatever this mystery is is themselves, who they saw in a reflection but thought was someone else, because they can’t recognize themselves by sight.
And the story probably ends with that – they’ve begun to figure out who they are, but their condition doesn’t change, and because of that condition they can’t themselves solve the mystery, even though the reader can. But the progress & growth for the character is they do begin to understand who they are, and that journey of self-discovery is what leads them to the solution, they just never get the satisfaction of feeling it.