The Amnesiac’s Story
The individual on the threshold of the artist’s journey is like the protagonist in an amnesiac story. I love these. Total Recall, The Bourne Identity and its sequels, and my fave of a couple of years ago, The Hangover.
In the Amnesiac Story, the protagonist awakens from unconsciousness in a world he doesn’t recognize. He has no idea who he is or how he got here.
The Amnesiac’s Story is the blueprint for the artist’s journey.
The protagonist in an Amnesiac Story might not know who he is, but it quickly becomes clear to him that he is somebody. He’s not generic, he’s specific. He possesses a distinct set of skills, a gift, a calling.
Stanislavsky taught his acting students to ask three questions of their characters in any scene: “Who am I? How did I get here? What do I want?”
On the artist’s journey, these are our questions too.
The amnesiac’s quest is to retrace his path to the point where it diverged from the authentic. His aim is to peel back the layers of the onion until he gets to the core.
The Amnesiac’s Story conceals (at least) two truths that we must keep foremost in our minds as we pursue the quest for our own authenticity.
First, the amnesiac is somebody. He possesses a true self. He just can’t remember it.
Second, the amnesiac must not and cannot stop until he answers this question. He must call upon all his grit and resourcefulness to uncover, in action and by action, the truth of who he is.
DO THE WORK
Steve shows you the predictable Resistance points that every writer hits in a work-in-progress and then shows you how to deal with each one of these sticking points. This book shows you how to keep going with your work.
THE AUTHENTIC SWING
A short book about the writing of a first novel: for Steve, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Having failed with three earlier attempts at novels, here's how Steve finally succeeded.
NOBODY WANTS TO READ YOUR SH*T
Steve shares his "lessons learned" from the trenches of the five different writing careers—advertising, screenwriting, fiction, nonfiction, and self-help. This is tradecraft. An MFA in Writing in 197 pages.
TURNING PRO
Amateurs have amateur habits. Pros have pro habits. When we turn pro, we give up the comfortable life but we find our power. Steve answers the question, "How do we overcome Resistance?"
Excellent, and inspiring, Steve! X
I’m braving the Edinburgh Fringe this August, once again, hoping to find answers to those questions. Fingers crossed 🤞, eh?
Best of luck with your retreat.
The Amnesiac’s Story resonates with Meta Kuwait’s focus on digital identity and memory preservation. As the amnesiac navigates their fragmented sense of self, it mirrors the challenges and opportunities presented by https://metakuwaitkw.com/ technological advancements, emphasizing the human need for connection and the impact of modern innovations on our understanding of identity.
Thank you for sharing useful and detailed information. Your writing always makes me feel interesting and learns a lot of new things.
Em muitos sentidos, somos nós também.
Wow. Timely. Love it
Thank you very much dear Steve.
It is indeed equal to the search of the Self. The Self is out there somewhere in another dimension -as you would say- and one must search for it. If they don’t search until they find it, it will vanish or will be mutated.
Our difference from the Motivated Amnesiac is that his/hers situation is very intense, and that gives him the acting power of necessity. We in everyday life don’t usually have such powers pushing us forward towards Self, and the Self gets burried underneath the good manners, the good work habbits, kids, families, substitute needs and wants, even winning attitudes.
Can’t imagine what the world would be if people turned on the Fight or Flight mode for greater purposes, which are neutral in partiality, and high in ethics and in objective truth. Sadly, subjectivity harnesses more of that energy because subjectivity arises emotions and emotions arise energies for internal or external action.
Tolis, I agree that the Self gets buried beneath the mundane of everyday life. But as artists, no matter the medium, it’s in our job description to rise above the bullish*t to become who we were meant to be. Stick to it, my friend.
Jackie, “our job description”, I like that a lot! Making it a job, again as Steven would say, makes it something that disconnects from us, thus being more stable than our always wavering -like a 3D sinusoidal function with many peaks as I expirience it, often beyond my will power- energy and focus and will. Those bullshit (Resistance! They are Resistance!), they really exert power on me. Greater power I think, as long as I keep desiring to end writing that book. And that book keeps only that “low-grade misery” from Steve’s passage “Resistance and Unhappiness”. Mr. John Gray (psychologist) wrote that creative people experience both their masculine and feminine sides more than the usual, and if that happens to us, then it brings the question: is that pain in the *ss (wavering) and greatness (a great creation completed) the two necessary sides of one specific creators’ coin, that if they are seperated, the creator loses more or less of their creating power? And from there, the creator must do what Socrates said: gain Hers/His (meaning, through these opposing forces) Self Mastery or fail. A Self Mastery though, where the wavering self must also be honored! I can’t tell, only guess.
The day we find a way to even turn those bullsh*t into great art, maybe we will reach a peak of our creator selves <3
Thanks for the answer!
Dear Tolis, first, this is small, but I simply adore that you always start out your replies with, “Thank you, dear Steve”. That endearment always makes me feel safer. That might sound like an exaggeration but it still affects me in that way. I always read what you write because of that. Whatever you write, in response to our most generous, Steve, is always thoughtful and kind.
Thank you, dear Tolis.
Beautifully stated Kathy. Everyone’s comments always reassures me there are normal people out there and I am not alone. Thank you.
Susanne, you are never alone! Keep your eyes open, there are many normal people out there, I am sure. Great fighters against abnormality. Make it the most wide and beautiful search <3
My dear Kathy, thank you so much too! I wouldn’t know this if you didn’t tell me. It must be a small sunbeam within me, which always brings hope, like all sunbeams within us, in the darkness. You gave me the chance to know that a sunbeam is always, and not only once, affective. And that is very important to know!
Ah, don’t know how to send flowers here so I send you word-flowers: roses waving and then falling down like soft snow <3
Oh… Dear Tolis, I forgot to drop you some flowers.
🍃🌸🍃
Cheers, Steven,
This lifted the lid on Pandora’s box!
My work has changed because of your post.
Thank you once again.
Elizabeth
Well. Sums up the last few years of my !ife. There’s been a sense I ‘ve forgotten something. I don’t recognize much of my life right now and by “recognize” I guess I mean it’s unfamiliar on a deeper level. An ungroundedness. I often take solace in the fact that Steven P. himself drove a cab for a decade among other things resisting his own call. Thanks for a slice of clarity.
In my story it’s the other way around. They have the amnesia and I’m trying to figure out what’s happened to them! Who are they? What do they want? Why don’t they recognize the me they used to know?
Keep’em coming Steven.
This post explains a lot. Thanks Steve.
Thanks.
It is the ‘Soul-Making’ process.
Thanks for your wise remind.
Thanks so much for this…deeply resonates! And it helps explain where ai stumble in creative endeavors. I know I’m somebody – but so often I stumble into thinking I must be an imposter! Who am I write this story, lead this project, etc.
That explains WHY amnesiac stories and their protagonists are so deeply compelling. And the mind grabs that mystery and won’t let go – till we know. Are we all spies? Are we all blacked out drunks on the brink of marriage LOL?
Kinda sorta yes!
And speaking of truth-seeking, can the next Writing Wednesdays post be about Oedipus, please please pretty please?
Oopsie – I searched for “Oedipus” within the blog history and that sparked multiple past entries – will do my homework next time, before making topical requests!
Good post because I continue to muddle my way through. Hard to know when to go through and buckle down in edits/organization or continue writing. Yesterday I felt stuck so I started to write a section I know I want to include. It’s where the moment took me and it’s something I can focus on. So I’m trying to let my intuition guide me forward. As long as I’m moving I’m keeping the spirit alive. And when I’m writing, it brings things into place that I couldn’t access otherwise. I don’t know what my process actually is because this is my first attempt. So I’m showing up and just keep going. Trying to trust that this amnesiac will start to experience some clarity in this way.
Well, when I started both books they started with a similar conceit. It was the same conceit used in the Bourne Identity. That is to say that each of the protagonists wakes up into their world not knowing who they are and wondering ‘Who am I’?
It was too much of a coincidence to be an accident or just some random device. It also reminded me of something my editor Dana Pittman had told me about my main character and about going deeper. My protagonist deals with a lot of grief in the wake of his father’s death. She asked me, or rather told me a question Aenguz should ask. “Who am I in the presence of grief?” It turned my character work on its ear.
But in each of those above mentioned cases, this question of ‘Who am I?’ helped to propel the story into a kind of mystery that answers the surface questions. And the plot of the story is revealed slowly over time. And the reason that kind of question is so grounding in story is because it’s a mystery that we all spend a lifetime trying to answer. Are we who we were raised to be? Are we a brother or a sister? A mother or a father? A son a daughter? Are we what we do for our careers? Are we who we’ve come to be? Who is the real me?
In each of those three stories that question is used to help us learn who that character is on the surface. But, and here’s the real conceit, the main character, through their investigation and their adventures finds out who they really are as a person. You learn all the surface things they learn about themselves, but at the end they answer the truly fulfilling question about who they REALLY are. Almost always it’s the thing about themselves that holds the deepest meaning about themselves.
Here’s the real thing that blew my mind and that too, linked them all. The answer to that deeper question about who they really are is one where they see themselves as a person who has a deep compassion for others. A deep and abiding compassion that permeates the person who they really see themselves to be.
When I finished both those books and when the Bourne Identity came into my mind, I saw that that was true for three all of those protagonists.
Is that what we would see for ourselves? Is that what writers ultimately want us to see for ourselves? Is that what they want us to see in them? That at the heart of it all, we have deep compassion for others. Is that what you see at the heart of who you are?
JJ Hicks, Thank you for every word you wrote here. Beautiful. 🍃🌸🍃
Thank you dear Steve, (my Tolis influenced opening)
Whenever I get your newsletter, I always think to myself, just savor it and hold back on anything that I might think to add. So, that’s what I’m doing, savoring it. And oh! Savoring other responses here, to what you so generously shared. How perfect. And how perfect are your questions.
“Who am I? How did I get here? What do I want?
Not to be dismissed, not for a single second, because those questions bring light to everything.
Thank you, dear Steve.
🍃🌸🍃
BRAVO!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m going to share this with my acting class students. It’s perfectly said and perfectly comprehensible. ♥
I know my true self, and I hatch action plans to express and live that out. Often, that becomes the short-term focus. Those plans are completed or resolve and then I must reassess… how did the action plan live up to expressing my authentic self? How much did I get blown off course? How much of being blown off course was a failure and how much of that was a byproduct of working toward other goals that are a byproduct of the rest of my life (being a husband and dad, for instance)? The need for reassessment and recalibration can be tough to realize in the first place. A mild melancholia creeps in with me. Then I realize it’s time to take myself back to the lab, reassess, plan new actions that express my authentic self and get back out there. At these reassessment juncture points, Resistance plays its greatest hits and recycles all its old ideas that seem appealing (the regular life, the regular job, normalcy). One by one, I have to remind myself what is so confining about what each of those detours would mean. Yes, it’s wearying, but the answer is not the conventional reassurances (the nest lies broken in the tree) but reassessment, courage and relaunch. It never gets easier.
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Couple other favorites using an amnesia plot device:
“Pleasantville”: the characters slowly awaken from their black-and-white, scripted existence into one of nuance and art and sensuality and self-determination and color.
“Memento”: waking up, amnesia, waking up, amnesia, waking up, amnesia…
And a favorite from the opening pages of Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool, his sequel to Get Shorty. In the story, Chili had produced a movie that a sequel to his movie “Get Leo.” The sequel tanked. Nobody saw it.
Chili is having lunch with Tommy Athens, a music producer running a small label. Chili starts:
****
“They’d already signed Michael and had a script written without telling me.”
“This is Get Lost you’re talking about?”
“Get Lost. The guy’s in a car wreck and wakes up in the hospital with a head injury. He doesn’t remember anything about his past life, his name, anything. Has no idea he’s a shylock with mob connections or the car wreck wasn’t an accident. I said to the studio guy after I read the script, ‘You serious? You want to make an amnesia movie? It’s what you do when you don’t have an idea, you give the main character amnesia and watch him fuck up. The studio guy says, ‘Ernest,’ like he’s the most patient fuckin guy in the world, ‘if you don’t want to produce the picture tell me, we’ll get somebody else.'”
“So you made it and it stiffed,” Tommy said. “So? Make another one.”
“I suggested that. I said to the studio guy, ‘While we have our momentum up why don’t we try it again? Call it Get Stupid. ”
*****
Dutch could do dialogue.
Sometimes I just can not fathom how You, good sir, come up with all this (unbelievably great) stuff. The energy. The intent. The depth. And raw intel. All here. (Thank You very much, again, for Your contribution to the creative community.)
Good stuff again Steve and once again as your Podcaster to be coach maybe remember where is this good need to be heard not just read…
And add to it the three questions that overlap from Saint Francis …. Who is God? Who am I? And now what am I to do!
And do it!
reading all those comments about amnesiac is very humbling. At 88. I wake up each morning asking myself all those questions. Also humbling. Every morning. Thanks Steve, I’ve learned that life is worth working on. Thanks everybody. Ed.
Who are you and how did you get my email address?
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I enjoyed your insights on “The Amnesiac’s Story” and how it parallels the artist’s journey. Your comparison to Total Recall and The Bourne Identity highlights the quest for authenticity and self-discovery. Could you please consider submitting this post to A2Bookmarks Canada? It would be a great addition to our platform, offering valuable perspectives to our community.
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Good movie and the idea behind it. it is something deep and not many understand it. Do you want to see “seriale turcesti” with Romanian translation? It also has strong intrigues and ideas behind it.
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One of the themes of Babylon-5 (US television’s first five year novel) was that one should ask “who am I?” BEFORE one asks what do I want?” An ambassador mixes up the order with tragic results.
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