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Your Life Story: Blockbuster or Straight-to-DVD?
December 31, 2013 by Lizabeth Phelps
What if life is a story?
You know, a tale with a setting, characters, plot, maybe even a moral—and where you’re the protagonist? The hero/heroine.
Right now, if screenwriters were to knock on your door and want to put your life on the big screen…would it be a blockbuster? Or would it be a straight-to-DVD yawner filling the at-check-out bin at Walmart?
I have just finished reading a book by New York Times bestseller, Donald Miller, who was himself approached by screenwriters after the success of his novel, Blue Like Jazz. They wanted to make a story of his life, but there was a problem. (Every good story needs one, after all.) After a long interview with Don, one of the screenwriters suggested making “alterations” to his life story to improve the screenplay. As he spoke, Don’s life was becoming fictionalized and so Don spoke up, questioning this course of action.
The screenwriter explained, “In a pure story, there is purpose in every scene…A movie is going somewhere.” He paused and said matter-of-factly, “Your real life is boring.”
It took Don a day or so, but he soon had to admit this assessment was true and said to a friend one morning: “I tell good stories; I don’t live good stories.”
His friend agreed. Don decided right then that he wanted to “be a person worth telling stories about” and he began to wonder if life could be written like a good story; if a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally? The book, A Million Miles In a Thousand Years, is the result of that discovery process. This blog post is a summary of all that Don learned—and more. It is my intention that you not be the same person at the end of this article that you are right where you sit.
As a new year begins, I cannot imagine a better time for asking some of the biggest questions of our lives. I turn fifty at the end of 2014, and so the question, “Am I living a good story?” is exceedingly relevant. Perhaps something bigger than the start of a new year is happening for you, too, that makes it pressing for you to ask the same question.
Whatever is calling you, make the choice to take your life off the shelf right now, pull back the front cover, and take a good, long look at your story…
What is a Good Story?
“If it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in a life,” Don Miller writes in A Million Miles. He’s saying, of course, that if your story won’t make a compelling tale onscreen (or on pages), it is not making a compelling life.
“A story is based on what [the writer] thinks is important, so when we live a story, we’re telling the people around us what we think is important.”
Take a quick snapshot of your life right now. What are you telling the people around you is important??
Do you have your answer? Don’t take the easy way out by reading but not doing. Get your answer…and then I ask you, Does it satisfy you or give you pause?
Maybe we should step back and ask the question, “What makes for a good story”? I have written novels in my past and studied this genre extensively for over a decade. But I think we know instinctively that a good story has, first and foremost, a character we care about. And why do we care about that character? Ideally, he or she will be someone we like, who does things that are universally understood to be good, nice, valiant and even remarkable. They have us at “hello” (and screenwriters do this deliberately early on) at these initial signs of “good humanness.”
I think it is true that if we do not like ourselves, if we cannot see qualities and values within ourselves that we admire, we are not going to be living a good story. If you are the protagonist of your own story (and you are), but do not like the character you are, you aren’t going to like your story and will naturally write a bad one. But the good news is that good story is all about character transformation, so you can write yourself into a character you love and admire.
But even if you’re not there yet—and in many stories, we do not like a character at first. He’s a universally recognized reprobate. Yet, in spite of ourselves, we are pulled into the story, unable to look away—we care about the character and where the story is heading–if he has one thing. Do you know what it is?
Desire.
He wants something…badly. Even if his main ambition is to score cocaine, like Jordon Belfort, the real-life reprobate protagonist of Wolf on Wall Street–if he wants it badly enough, we want it for him. That is good story.
When my daughter was in elementary school, I wanted her to understand story structure. I told her that a good story always has the underlying question, “Uh-oh, uh-oh, what’s going to happen?” And this really means, “Uh-oh, uh-oh, is he going to get what he wants?” If you, as the reader, do not feel this question, it is a bad story. If you do not feel this question in your life, it, too, is not a good story.
Don Miller was watching Star Wars as he wrote his book and was analyzing why it is such a good story, “No character in Star Wars has a vague ambition,” he noted. “I could point toward any major character and say exactly what that person wanted. “ He wondered if the reasons our lives seem “so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we…have no clear idea of what we want?”
If it’s boring on screen or on the page, it is most certainly because the character does not want something badly enough. Or what they want is too small, too risk-less.
He had a stark realization. “I realized that what I spent money on was, in many ways, the sum of my ambitions…I was a protagonist telling a boring story about trying to pay off his nice condo. My only consolation was that I wasn’t alone. I think most Americans aren’t living very good stories.”
This is one of my favorite of his lines: The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. Let’s read that again. The ambitions we have will become the stories we live.
He says that if we want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want.
So, I am asking you: What do you want?
And remember this: A story is based on what we think is important, so when we live a story, we’re telling the people around us what we think is important.
What are you telling those around you is important by your ambitions?
Don writes: “The main way we learn story is not through movies or books; it’s through each other. You become like the people you interact with. And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will, too. We teach our children good or bad stories, what is worth living for and what is worth dying for, what is worth pursuing by the dignity with which a character engages his own narrative.”
Ouch.
By the way you live, by what you want, are you teaching your children how to have a good story or a bad one?
Miller tells a great story about a father whose daughter had gotten into some bad trouble. He told Don, “I realized that I hadn’t mapped out a story for my family and so in the absence of a family story, [my daughter] chose one where there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence. She wasn’t bad; she was just choosing the best story available to her.” So, he created a better story to invite her into, which included getting involved in a national charity project.
How can you invite your children into a better story?
How can you invite your spouse, your employees, your friends into a better story?
Once again, watching the main character pursue her ambition is the reason a viewer keeps watching. And it is the reason you, the protagonist of your life, keeps going, keeps playing. It is your raison d’etre.
Is your raison d’etre, your ambition, good enough to write a great story about?
Of course, there is a vital element in a character’s pursuit of desire that makes the story truly compelling; is the reason we cannot pull our eyes from the screen. It is that question, “Uh-oh, uh-oh, what’s going to happen?” The potentiality that the ambition will not be realized.
Conflict.
There must be, in every story, conflict, or the story is boring. The heroine can’t easily get what she wants. Not for readers and viewers to get any satisfaction, anyway. And the same is true in life.
The screenwriters re-writing Don Millers life told him, “We need to put you through a lot of conflict or the story will get boring. Nobody remembers easy stories.”
Don muses on the page: “But humans are designed to seek comfort and order and tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort isn’t all that comfortable, and even if they secretly want for something better…Part of me wonders if our stories aren’t being stolen by the easy life.”
Don realized, as he examined his life in preparation of planning a new one, that his entire life had been designed to make himself more comfortable.
Is your life being stolen by the easy life? By the seduction of comfort? Do you want to be comfortable more than you want to live a great story?
Nobody remembers easy stories.
But few want to live through the fear of challenge enough to live a great story.
“Yes,” Don writes, “[ambition] creates fear, but it also creates the story. But it’s a good trade because life no longer feels meaningless. Suddenly there is a risk in your story, and the question about whether you’ll make it or not.”
That question is the heartbeat of a story, and the heartbeat of a great life.
Characters facing their greatest fears with courage is what makes a story good. Great stories are told in conflict. “The same elements that make a movie meaningful are the ones that make a life meaningful. A character has to face his greatest fears.”
Is there conflict in your life? Are you facing your greatest fears? Or is your story being stolen by the easy life?
Robert McKee, a Fulbright Scholar, is the most sought after screenwriting lecturer around the globe. I’m excited to be going to his 4-day lecture in April. He tells his students that the way to know a character is to witness her make choices under pressure, in pursuit of her desire.
If there is conflict in your life, what choices are you making under the pressure? Are you making the ones that allow the conflict to forge you?
Transformation.
Miller writes, “If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, then the point of life is character transformation….If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet.”
I love that. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet.
Has your story happened yet? Or is it waiting for you to change?
You can make a character (yourself) change. All great story writers know this. It’s called evoking an “inciting incident.” This is an event in a story that forces a character to move…the thing that happens to throw your character into their story. Another great writing mentor, Steven Pressfield, defines it as “the doorway through which they can’t return.”
Ahhh….I love that. It’s what I do with my clients. Take them to the doorway through which they cannot return.
I love it because the inciting incident disrupts a comfortable life. Without it, a character won’t enter into a story because they naturally seek comfort and stability. The character must jump into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.
Are you jumping—or keeping your story at bay?
My clients typically won’t enter into the story they could be living without the inciting incident of working with me to craft their business (and really, life) message. With me, they jump in, knowing they want something, but not knowing just how deeply they will tumble into a new story.
You can, and my invitation to you for 2014 is that you do, EXECUTE your own inciting incident. Choose something that will force yourself to move. Something that will throw you into a great, juicy, meaningful story!
That will be the start of your character transformation.
Choose something—right now, as you’re reading this–that is the doorway through which you cannot return. What is it? What is it?
(I am most happy to oblige. I have a magic box filled with doorways. Would you like one? Just contact me.)
Miller writes this so eloquently: “When we look back on our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out.”
And certainly, the times we worked harder to make a LIFE stand out.
“Great stories have memorable scenes…and so does a good life.”
It is time for you to create memorable scenes. Right now.
Scenes that will make your entire life memorable one day, so that the “end scene” is one you are proud of. Miller tells a story of a good friend who lives through the tragedy of losing his wife to cancer. At the memorial—poignant, filled with love, important–Miller thinks to himself, “You can’t build an end scene as beautiful as this by sitting on a couch.”
You want your end scene to be rich, important, meaningful. So get yourself an inciting incident now.
The EPIC
Maybe you’re like my clients, who want that end scene to be the culmination of an epic story.
The screenwriters rewriting Don Miller’s real-life story tell him, “A story goes to the [epic] level with two key elements, and both have to do with the ambition of a character. First, what the character wants must be “very difficult to attain.” The more difficult, the better the story. When there is more at stake, the “uh-oh, uh-oh, what’s going to happen” question becomes exponentially more interesting—and so does the life.
Why not go for an epic story? What desire would be “very difficult” for you to attain?
Are you a little confronted by that idea, of going for an epic story? Remember, a story isn’t interesting without some negative turns, those incidents that seemingly turn the protagonist away from his ambition. Don writes, “A protagonist who understands this idea lives a better story. He doesn’t give up when he encounters a setback because he knows that every story has both kinds of turns…The point of a story is never about the ending…it’s about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. [But] this is when most people give up their stories…they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought.”
To writers in his workshops, Robert McKee insists, “You have to take your character to the place where he just can’t take it anymore…Conflict is what changes a person.” And great characters always change.
Miller goes through a painful breakup as he writes A Million Miles (which part of him is grateful for because at least it means he is living a story, which he hadn’t been before.) He says: “I didn’t shave. I didn’t eat. As my story stopped, so did I.”
And I love his next sentence. Love it: “You can’t go on without a story any longer than you can read a book about nothing.”
Are you trying to? Go on without a story? Are you fooling yourself into thinking that you have one? You can’t go on without a story. You just can’t. In 2014, don’t accept the easy life. It isn’t a life at all.
The second element of an epic tale is that the ambition is sacrificial. The character must go through all of the pain for the sake of someone or something else. “Those stories are gold,” one of the screenwriters tells Miller.
So, it goes without saying that you are going to live a good, even great, story in 2014. And I’m going to push the envelope (inciting incident) and suggest to you that it’s time to go further and live an EPIC story—where your ambition is very difficult to attain and where that all that difficulty is done for something bigger than yourself.
What is that? Right now–just answer. You’ll surprise yourself.
When I decided on the name Inspired Leadership Training eight years ago (now Inspired Leaders’ Academy), I was very clear that my clients (coaches, consultants, speakers and authors) were in business to live an epic story. Their journey wouldn’t be easy, but all of the sacrifices would be meaningful and important and absolutely worth it—because they were doing it for the sake of others. And not “just” their families. The world. They were on earth to make changes worthy of writing stories about.
If you are not living a life and building a business worthy of a great story, now is your chance. Right now. Now is your time to tell those around you what you really think is important—by what you want, how far you will go to get it, what you’re willing to sacrifice, how steadfast you are when the middle hits and you’re wondering why you’re doing it at all, and by who you’re doing it all for. This is when you, your character, is revealed—and your story is written.
Don Miller says, “Once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice…”
Now you know.
I’ll see you at the doorway.
Joanne Dorian says: Thank you for this brilliant article! HAPPY NEW YEAR, LIZABETH! You are an inspiration!
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Lizabeth Phelps says:
Joanne, I’m sorry it took so long to respond. Thank you so much!! Here’s to living a life worth writing stories about!!
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