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ljwritesI'm reading Story Engineering by Larry Brooks--almost finished it, in fact. The good news is I found it pretty helpful. I'll probably review it later on, and will use the method described in the book to outline my novels in progress.
The bad news is that the book has its share of fails when it comes to sex and relationship in stories. One of these moments involves Thelma and Louise and the others involve romance in fiction. I figured I'd get my complaints out of the way before I discuss the rest of the book later on.
At one point a little past the halfway point of Chapter 22, Brooks discusses the difference between the inciding incident and the First Plot Point. To illustrate he cites the inciting incident early in the movie Thelma & Louise, and describes it as follows:
Okay, for one thing, Thelma did not shoot the man in the parking lot. Louise shot him. Thelma was not in any sort of condition to shoot a gun, given that she was sobbing and putting her clothes back in order.
Which brings me to the most egregious mistake of that passage, that the murdered man had come on too strong in the parking lot. I actually wondered if I was misremembering what that expression meant, and looked it up in a couple of places. But no, I had not misremembered--people use "coming on too strong" to mean getting too sexual, too fast or making pushy sexual advances. At most it means taking action that makes one seem assertive or angry, but in a sexual context it means moving too quickly or being pushy.
The character Louise shot and killed did much more than make unwanted advances toward Thelma. This is what he did (trigger warning for sexual violence):
in what world is this simply an overly-aggressive sexual advance? This is full-out rape, and hits all the "legitimate rape" (*barf*) buttons you can think of. Strange man, outdoors, violence, screaming, physical resistance, the works. (Other than the part where she danced and flirted with him and then followed him outside, which I guess means to some people that she totally asked for it, ugh.)
To be clear, I'm not saying rape only takes place in overtly violent scenarios like the one described above, and in fact a sizable number of rapes don't fit this mold. My point is that even with a rape attempt this overt, Larry Brooks still downgraded it to the level of the guy being pushy or overeager.
Maybe Brooks misremembered the incident, but then again he calls the shooting an act of "angry self-defense," implying the guy did something more than be a little too forward. So why the confusing use of language?
By the way, in another of Brooks' inaccuracies about the movie, the shooting was not any sort of self-defense. Thelma was out of danger when the man released her under Louise's "suggestion." Louise had the situation under full control, gun in hand. This was when the guy got the bright idea to insult her by telling her to "suck my dick." Bam.
Awful as the guy was, Louise murdered him pure and simple. It wasn't exactly a cold-blooded killing either, though, because you can tell by Susan Sarandon's masterful performance that Louise is triggered all over the place in this scene. Unfortunately for the would-be rapist, the trigger was literal in this case.
So yeah, I had some issues with the description of the murdered man as "coming on too hard" on Thelma. It's common for the details of a movie to become fuzzy with time, but maybe it's a good idea to refresh one's memory before using the work in a book and making a mistake.
If this is a case of misremembering, it's even more interesting that Brooks forgot about the attempted rape. I think it would have been much harder for a woman to forget that scene. It shows a huge difference of perspective, that a scene that could be one person's worst nightmare is comfortably worn away in another's mind.
(By the way, when I talked it over with Husband he suggested that maybe Mr. Brooks meant the guy had come on too strong, i.e. been too assertive/aggressive, after Louise aimed the gun at him. Husband agreed that the expression was wrong if Brooks was referring to the rape attempt on Thelma. Due to the phrasing I'm inclined to think the latter--Brooks makes no mention of the gun, only of reaching the parking lot--but maybe it was a case of less-than-clear writing. You can judge for yourself, but at the very least Brooks' description of the movie is muddled enough to give rise to very Unfortunate Implications.)
So "come on too strong" is just four words, but that's not the only issue I have with how the book discusses sex and romance. Brooks also said some pretty disturbing things in describing a prototypical romance story, one from real life, the other fictional.
The first example shows up at about the two-thirds point of Chapter 31, and it is from Larry Brooks' relationship as a young man with a woman named Tina. A month into the relationship, everything seemed to be going fine and he made some comment about their future together, at which Tina's eyes grew distant and she said, "If I'm around, that is." (Note to Mr. Brooks: This kind of thing is called "coming on too strong," not your Thelma & Louise example.)
From then on, as Mr. Brooks remembers, everything changed. This is how he describes the altered terms of their relationship in story structure terms:
Mmkay, so this is where I got uncomfortable. According to Mr. Brooks, his ex-girlfriend's disinterest in him was an obstacle he had to overcome, This seems to fall into the conception of romance where the protagonist is the mover and shaker and the romantic interest is a prize to be won. At the extreme the romantic interest gets no, or minimal, development--they're like goalposts or a milestones, just sitting around waiting for the protagonist to reach them or not. In story terms this kind of romantic interest is objectified in a very real sense. This is similar to the concerns I voiced about Jeff Gerke's Plot Versus Character.
That said, I don't want to knock the protagonist-centric model of storytelling too much. Sometimes, in fact often, you can improve your relationships by growing as a person. Lots of people will like you better if you break out of destructive patterns like irresponsibility or addiction. Personal improvement does in fact help with relationships at all levels, including your dating life. Plus, the protagonist-centric model has the advantage of simplicity and focus--rather than, say, 10 people going through their own development arcs, you can concentrate on and cheer for just one, the protagonist. So there is something to be said for a story where only the protagonist gets any meaningful character development.
My problem is with the way Larry Brooks applies this protagonist-centric model to "guy gets/fails to get girl" stories: He sets up the romantic interest's lack of feelings as an antagonist force that the protagonist must overcome. Rather than a story about two people growing into a romance based on shared compatibility, we get a story where the girl's feelings are actually the enemy that the hero must overcome.
It's not a very big step from there to saying that the girl is the enemy, and that her resistance must be broken down through the hero's ingenuity and strength of character. That doesn't seem to me like it goes anyplace good.
In fact, Brooks says as much in what seems to be a fictional version of the Tina episode or something like it, an example that shows up about a third of the way into Chapter 36. In this hypothetical story, the hero's girlfriend leaves him and he must win her back. The emphasis in the quote is mine:
For one thing I believe she's the ex-girlfriend now, having broken up with our hero. Aside from nomenclature (which as real consequences, as I'll illustrate below), I found myself getting actively nervous at the way this "girlfriend's" action is described:
And then he suggests the following to show the strength of the antagonistic force:
There's a little more than a whiff of slut-shaming here. Also, she's not your girlfriend anymore Brooks- I mean "hero!"
This is actually an important point because if this character were the hero's girlfriend she'd be cheating on him in this scene. As it is, though, what she's done is gone on a trip with someone else after breaking off a relationship with a former boyfriend. The "girlfriend" label, rather than being a convenient shorthand, seems to be there to muddle the distinction and to attach a moral indictment where it doesn't belong.
The same goes for the epithet "another lover" for the man she's with, since so far as we know this is her only lover at this point. I mean, she could have lovers galore and that's fine, but the example doesn't mention any other romantic/sexual partner than the hero and the Ritz-Carlton guy. The clear implication is that Brooks considers the hero to be her lover in addition to the current guy--as though her rejection doesn't count and they're still together. That's kind of the idea behind this entire premise, isn't it, that the girlfriend's dumping the hero "like an empty can of Red Bull," an action neither the reader nor the hero can understand, is just a setback and not a valid end to the relationship?
Now I can think of a couple of ways this setup can actually turn out well. Maybe the hero realizes that it's a wrongheaded goal to win back a woman who doesn't want to be with him anymore. Maybe he can instead seek to understand her reasons for ending a relationship that seemed so good to him. Maybe the ex-girlfriend has problems of her own, say, with using people for pleasure and throwing them away. She could come to see how deeply she's hurt her ex-boyfriend by leaving the relationship so abruptly and with no closure, and apologizes. All these are interactions between realistically flawed people that could make for a good story. The idea that a woman wrongs a man just by leaving him and that he must get back what is rightfully "his," on the other hand, is nothing short of scary.
The point of this post isn't to say "Larry Brooks is a terrible human being and no one should read his books!" In fact, I started out by saying his book is pretty good. Rather, this post is my attempt to unpack my own reactions. Unless I work through them thoroughly I'm going to find the ignored feelings of fear and anger coming out in other, sneaky ways, so I wanted to confront and deal with them first to give the book a fair shake.
Also, tempting as it may be when I'm feeling angry or threatened, I don't think Larry Brooks is a bad guy, either. I don't know him, but he seems to love his wife and is in most likelihood a decent guy like most men are. It would be so much easier if sexism were a matter of a few "bad apples" as some would like to believe. Instead, sexism is a hard problem precisely because it's a systematic, not personal issue--so pervasive that it sneaks into all sorts of media like this book, and because good people internalize these ideas not out of bad intentions but out of inertia. I know I'm not free of sexist ideas myself because I live in a system that perpetuates these ideas. The best I can do is critically examine and evaluate them, both in myself and it others. This is one of my attempts at that kind of critical examination.
The bad news is that the book has its share of fails when it comes to sex and relationship in stories. One of these moments involves Thelma and Louise and the others involve romance in fiction. I figured I'd get my complaints out of the way before I discuss the rest of the book later on.
At one point a little past the halfway point of Chapter 22, Brooks discusses the difference between the inciding incident and the First Plot Point. To illustrate he cites the inciting incident early in the movie Thelma & Louise, and describes it as follows:
In Ridley Scott's film Thelma & Louise, two women shoot and kill a guy they've met in a bar but who comes on too strong once they reach the parking lot.
Okay, for one thing, Thelma did not shoot the man in the parking lot. Louise shot him. Thelma was not in any sort of condition to shoot a gun, given that she was sobbing and putting her clothes back in order.
Which brings me to the most egregious mistake of that passage, that the murdered man had come on too strong in the parking lot. I actually wondered if I was misremembering what that expression meant, and looked it up in a couple of places. But no, I had not misremembered--people use "coming on too strong" to mean getting too sexual, too fast or making pushy sexual advances. At most it means taking action that makes one seem assertive or angry, but in a sexual context it means moving too quickly or being pushy.
The character Louise shot and killed did much more than make unwanted advances toward Thelma. This is what he did (trigger warning for sexual violence):
He had Thelma pinned to the hood of a car and wanted sex, which Thelma didn't. He got very insistent and wouldn't let her go. Thelma slapped him; he slapped her twice, spun her around, then bent her over the hood of a car. While she screamed and pleaded at him to let her go, he raised her skirt, lowered her panties, and kicked her legs apart. At this point Louise appeared and put a gun to his head.
in what world is this simply an overly-aggressive sexual advance? This is full-out rape, and hits all the "legitimate rape" (*barf*) buttons you can think of. Strange man, outdoors, violence, screaming, physical resistance, the works. (Other than the part where she danced and flirted with him and then followed him outside, which I guess means to some people that she totally asked for it, ugh.)
To be clear, I'm not saying rape only takes place in overtly violent scenarios like the one described above, and in fact a sizable number of rapes don't fit this mold. My point is that even with a rape attempt this overt, Larry Brooks still downgraded it to the level of the guy being pushy or overeager.
Maybe Brooks misremembered the incident, but then again he calls the shooting an act of "angry self-defense," implying the guy did something more than be a little too forward. So why the confusing use of language?
By the way, in another of Brooks' inaccuracies about the movie, the shooting was not any sort of self-defense. Thelma was out of danger when the man released her under Louise's "suggestion." Louise had the situation under full control, gun in hand. This was when the guy got the bright idea to insult her by telling her to "suck my dick." Bam.
Awful as the guy was, Louise murdered him pure and simple. It wasn't exactly a cold-blooded killing either, though, because you can tell by Susan Sarandon's masterful performance that Louise is triggered all over the place in this scene. Unfortunately for the would-be rapist, the trigger was literal in this case.
So yeah, I had some issues with the description of the murdered man as "coming on too hard" on Thelma. It's common for the details of a movie to become fuzzy with time, but maybe it's a good idea to refresh one's memory before using the work in a book and making a mistake.
If this is a case of misremembering, it's even more interesting that Brooks forgot about the attempted rape. I think it would have been much harder for a woman to forget that scene. It shows a huge difference of perspective, that a scene that could be one person's worst nightmare is comfortably worn away in another's mind.
(By the way, when I talked it over with Husband he suggested that maybe Mr. Brooks meant the guy had come on too strong, i.e. been too assertive/aggressive, after Louise aimed the gun at him. Husband agreed that the expression was wrong if Brooks was referring to the rape attempt on Thelma. Due to the phrasing I'm inclined to think the latter--Brooks makes no mention of the gun, only of reaching the parking lot--but maybe it was a case of less-than-clear writing. You can judge for yourself, but at the very least Brooks' description of the movie is muddled enough to give rise to very Unfortunate Implications.)
So "come on too strong" is just four words, but that's not the only issue I have with how the book discusses sex and romance. Brooks also said some pretty disturbing things in describing a prototypical romance story, one from real life, the other fictional.
The first example shows up at about the two-thirds point of Chapter 31, and it is from Larry Brooks' relationship as a young man with a woman named Tina. A month into the relationship, everything seemed to be going fine and he made some comment about their future together, at which Tina's eyes grew distant and she said, "If I'm around, that is." (Note to Mr. Brooks: This kind of thing is called "coming on too strong," not your Thelma & Louise example.)
From then on, as Mr. Brooks remembers, everything changed. This is how he describes the altered terms of their relationship in story structure terms:
I had an obstacle to overcome, and it was my own inner demons that stood in my way.
Mmkay, so this is where I got uncomfortable. According to Mr. Brooks, his ex-girlfriend's disinterest in him was an obstacle he had to overcome, This seems to fall into the conception of romance where the protagonist is the mover and shaker and the romantic interest is a prize to be won. At the extreme the romantic interest gets no, or minimal, development--they're like goalposts or a milestones, just sitting around waiting for the protagonist to reach them or not. In story terms this kind of romantic interest is objectified in a very real sense. This is similar to the concerns I voiced about Jeff Gerke's Plot Versus Character.
That said, I don't want to knock the protagonist-centric model of storytelling too much. Sometimes, in fact often, you can improve your relationships by growing as a person. Lots of people will like you better if you break out of destructive patterns like irresponsibility or addiction. Personal improvement does in fact help with relationships at all levels, including your dating life. Plus, the protagonist-centric model has the advantage of simplicity and focus--rather than, say, 10 people going through their own development arcs, you can concentrate on and cheer for just one, the protagonist. So there is something to be said for a story where only the protagonist gets any meaningful character development.
My problem is with the way Larry Brooks applies this protagonist-centric model to "guy gets/fails to get girl" stories: He sets up the romantic interest's lack of feelings as an antagonist force that the protagonist must overcome. Rather than a story about two people growing into a romance based on shared compatibility, we get a story where the girl's feelings are actually the enemy that the hero must overcome.
It's not a very big step from there to saying that the girl is the enemy, and that her resistance must be broken down through the hero's ingenuity and strength of character. That doesn't seem to me like it goes anyplace good.
In fact, Brooks says as much in what seems to be a fictional version of the Tina episode or something like it, an example that shows up about a third of the way into Chapter 36. In this hypothetical story, the hero's girlfriend leaves him and he must win her back. The emphasis in the quote is mine:
The antagonist here is the girlfriend. The antagonistic force is her disinterest in him. This blocks the hero's need to get her back.
For one thing I believe she's the ex-girlfriend now, having broken up with our hero. Aside from nomenclature (which as real consequences, as I'll illustrate below), I found myself getting actively nervous at the way this "girlfriend's" action is described:
[T]he hero's girlfriend dumps him like an empty can of Red Bull. A nice buzz, now she's done.
The reader is not sure why the girlfriend is running away . . . [The hero] doesn't know why either.
And then he suggests the following to show the strength of the antagonistic force:
[A] quick cutaway scene showing the girlfriend in Aspen, wrapped in the arms of another lover against a backdrop of falling snow through a picture window in their suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
There's a little more than a whiff of slut-shaming here. Also, she's not your girlfriend anymore Brooks- I mean "hero!"
This is actually an important point because if this character were the hero's girlfriend she'd be cheating on him in this scene. As it is, though, what she's done is gone on a trip with someone else after breaking off a relationship with a former boyfriend. The "girlfriend" label, rather than being a convenient shorthand, seems to be there to muddle the distinction and to attach a moral indictment where it doesn't belong.
The same goes for the epithet "another lover" for the man she's with, since so far as we know this is her only lover at this point. I mean, she could have lovers galore and that's fine, but the example doesn't mention any other romantic/sexual partner than the hero and the Ritz-Carlton guy. The clear implication is that Brooks considers the hero to be her lover in addition to the current guy--as though her rejection doesn't count and they're still together. That's kind of the idea behind this entire premise, isn't it, that the girlfriend's dumping the hero "like an empty can of Red Bull," an action neither the reader nor the hero can understand, is just a setback and not a valid end to the relationship?
Now I can think of a couple of ways this setup can actually turn out well. Maybe the hero realizes that it's a wrongheaded goal to win back a woman who doesn't want to be with him anymore. Maybe he can instead seek to understand her reasons for ending a relationship that seemed so good to him. Maybe the ex-girlfriend has problems of her own, say, with using people for pleasure and throwing them away. She could come to see how deeply she's hurt her ex-boyfriend by leaving the relationship so abruptly and with no closure, and apologizes. All these are interactions between realistically flawed people that could make for a good story. The idea that a woman wrongs a man just by leaving him and that he must get back what is rightfully "his," on the other hand, is nothing short of scary.
The point of this post isn't to say "Larry Brooks is a terrible human being and no one should read his books!" In fact, I started out by saying his book is pretty good. Rather, this post is my attempt to unpack my own reactions. Unless I work through them thoroughly I'm going to find the ignored feelings of fear and anger coming out in other, sneaky ways, so I wanted to confront and deal with them first to give the book a fair shake.
Also, tempting as it may be when I'm feeling angry or threatened, I don't think Larry Brooks is a bad guy, either. I don't know him, but he seems to love his wife and is in most likelihood a decent guy like most men are. It would be so much easier if sexism were a matter of a few "bad apples" as some would like to believe. Instead, sexism is a hard problem precisely because it's a systematic, not personal issue--so pervasive that it sneaks into all sorts of media like this book, and because good people internalize these ideas not out of bad intentions but out of inertia. I know I'm not free of sexist ideas myself because I live in a system that perpetuates these ideas. The best I can do is critically examine and evaluate them, both in myself and it others. This is one of my attempts at that kind of critical examination.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-28 02:39 pm (UTC)I think that's a really important point. I've been corresponding with a teenager in Europe who recently asked me whether the only way he could avoid being a predator and a creep as a straight male was to be celibate forever. Obviously there's a dash of bratty belligerence there, but I think the question is genuine and I hurt for him. I did give him some pointers, that there's nothing wrong with finding someone attractive as long as he's polite about it and respects the other person.
Reading your anecdote, though, I think the more fundamental point is to remember that a) he is not entitled to other people's bodies, and therefore b) "no" is a valid answer. He is not diminished if a woman tells him no, it is not an affront or judgment on him by itself--and well, if she' a jerk about it, then that's on her and not him. Good thing he got to know in advance, right?
Unfortunately I think he is at a point where he sees "no" as an indictment of his self-worth, and that's what makes it so hard. Guys like your high-school friend and Thomas are the rare ones, men who are secure in themselves so that they're not driven by the social pressure that says getting women is a validation of their worth as men.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-28 10:35 pm (UTC)I admit, my knee jerks with the straw man of "only way straight boys can't get shat on is be celibate," just because that kind of guilt-tripping was instrumental in the Raping Year.
Taking rejection with grace is a social skill I think everyone should learn.
--Rogan
no subject
Date: 2014-10-30 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-30 07:16 pm (UTC)--Rogan