People ask me sometimes, “When in your day do you first feel Resistance?” My answer: “The instant I open my eyes.” In fact maybe sooner. Maybe before I even know I’m awake. I feel it. It’s like Resistance is this huge, rapacious bear that sleeps in bed at my shoulder. By the time my feet hit the floor, it’s already lacing up its shoelaces. Resistance is waiting for me. He’s wide awake. He’s ready to rumble. He does not give me .0001 second of slack. What’s the answer? What’s my answer? The only way I’ve found to beat this bear…

“Empathy” is a term much in the news these days. It means of course that capacity of imagination that allows one person to feel another’s pain and to identify with, or even act in sympathy with, that other person. If you and I as writers want to create a memorable villain, we will banish that capacity from our Bad Guy’s character. The Alien feels no empathy. The Predator feels no empathy. The pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers feel no empathy. Each acts only in its own self-interest. Margin Call is one of my favorite movies of the past…

In the classic Western Shane there’s a character named Chris Calloway (played by Ben Johnson, who later won an Oscar for his role as “Sam the Lion” in The Last Picture Show.) Chris Calloway is the original bully in Shane. He’s the first of the Bad Cattlemen to humiliate Shane (Alan Ladd) in the bar room at Grafton’s, calling him “Sody Pop” and slinging a shot of whisky into his face. Chris brawls with Shane and in general shows himself to be a world-class sonofabitch. But later in the film when Chris learns that his boss, Rufe Ryker, plans to dry-gulch…

Let’s stay with Blade Runner in this post, but let’s go back to the 1982 original starring Harrison Ford and Sean Young and directed by Ridley Scott (screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples.) If indeed, as we’ve been positing in previous posts, The female carries the mystery and The male’s role is to uncover the mystery, then what happens when he (remember, the “male” can be a female too, as long as she acts in the archetypal rational/assertive/aggressive style of a male) does uncover the mystery? Answer: he is thrust into a moral crisis. He is forced to…

I’m going to generalize wildly in this post so please bear with me. Many exceptions could be cited legitimately to the principle I’m about to put forward (and maybe the principle itself is completely wrong). But it’s thought-provoking and its exploration, I hope, will give us all something to chew on. If, as we have proposed in earlier posts in this series, The female carries the mystery, then what is the male’s role? (Bear in mind that the “male” in our story could be a female, e.g. Diana in Wonder Woman or Sara Paretsky’s tough private eye V.I. Warshawski or…

  The movie Lawrence of Arabia, like The Wild Bunch or Seven Samurai or Moby Dick, is a story without any primary female characters. How, then, can it follow the principle we’ve been exploring in the past three posts: The female carries the mystery. The answer, I think, is that Lawrence himself (Peter O’Toole) is the female element. Lawrence is the female element and the male element. The primary issue posed by David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia (or at least one of several primary issues) is, to my mind, How can an individual reconcile his own authentic greatness with the…

In the past two posts we’ve been exploring the story idea that “the female carries the mystery.” But what exactly does “female” mean? Our reader Amber in an August 7 comment said Then I understood that it wasn’t female as a gender, but female as the concept. The feminine pull vs the masculine push. In this instance, the female “hide” vs the masculine “seek”. Andrea Reiman added something equally interesting. The feminine is chaos, the masculine is order. Mountains are masculine, water is feminine, etc. But [“the] female carries the mystery” is a more nuanced understanding of chaos. Well, she…

We said in last week’s post, speaking of novels or films with characters of both sexes, that The female carries the mystery. This principle, true as it is, is not enough to make a story work. In addition The female protects the mystery. Every story has a secret. Every tale has a meaning, an interpretation of depth. The protagonist’s role (either a male, or a female acting in a “male” capacity) is to uncover that secret. In Robert Towne’s script of Chinatown, the protagonist is private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson). His role in the drama is to get to…

I’ve got a new book coming from W.W. Norton in November. It’s a novel called 36 Righteous Men. If you followed last year the series on this blog called “Report from the Trenches,” you know the details of the huge crash this book took, midstream in its writing, and of my six months of nonstop hell trying to regroup, restructure, and reanimate it. The concept that saved the day came from Shawn Coyne’s editorial notes: The female carries the mystery. This is a helluva deep subject and one that, even now, I have only the sketchiest and most tenuous handle…

It’s unfortunate that the term “McGuffin”—meaning that thing that the Villain wants—sounds so dopey. Unfortunate because there’s a lot of meat to this idea. I suspect Alfred Hitchcock, the person we associate most with the term McGuffin, wanted the name to sound silly. In his mind it didn’t matter what the McGuffin was—the nuclear codes, the letters of transit, the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. All that mattered for him was that the villain wanted it. But the idea that the villain wants something—that he or she has an object of desire—is a topic worth examining in greater detail. We’ve said in…