Serious Lessons from a Fool on a Hill
By Keith Cronin | July 26, 2019 |
Notting Hill, that is.
As writers, we often draw our inspiration from a wide range of sources. Sometimes, those sources may be unlikely or counterintuitive. But the trick, I think, is to keep an open mind, and to stay receptive to inspiration from ANY source. Maybe that inspiration comes from Shakespeare. Maybe it comes from Margaret Atwood. Or maybe it comes from Hugh Grant. Stay with me on this, even if you’re not a fan of the floppy-haired actor.
On a recent Friday night, after a particularly stressful week that left me emotionally exhausted – and, I’ll admit, wondering what’s it all about, Alfie? – I suggested to my ESO (Extremely Significant Other) that we end our evening on a lighter note by watching (okay, re-watching) a nice breezy romantic comedy. After searching through my DVD shelves, which include a rom-com collection large enough to put the continued possession of my Man Card at considerable risk, we agreed on Notting Hill. Hey, don’t judge. You’ve got yoga and wine, or maybe scotch and cigars; I’ve got Hugh Grant.
The movie, a 20-year old rom-com classic that we were watching for the umpteenth time, served its purpose both dependably and admirably – in my case, lifting my spirits considerably; in her case, lulling her to sleep. All in all, a win across the board. But I took an added bonus from the viewing experience: I got inspired. Hence, this post.
Looking for opportunities to think bigger
Like many (if not all) of my fellow WU readers and contributors, I am always trying to raise my game as a writer. I tend to take a targeted approach to this, identifying weaknesses in my current writing style as well as opportunities to expand and improve said style.
Of late, one of my primary goals has been to amp up the emotional range in my writing. My stories historically have been fairly small in scale, and that smallness can extend into the emotional range that those stories explore. Sure, my characters find themselves happy or sad, or successful or threatened, but the range of those highs and lows is usually fairly conservative. I think this is a reflection of the conflict-averse path I often pursue in my own life, where I use my worrywart skills to avoid conflict rather than attack it head-on. Possibly a useful technique in real life, but it can result in muted fiction that fails to hit the extreme highs and lows that readers clearly crave.
I’m aware of this limitation in my writing, and that most of the conventional teaching on writing more powerful stories urges us to dig deeper, giving our characters bigger problems with higher stakes. In a reflective post I wrote last summer, I summarized this thinking with the self-imposed mantra to “go big or go home.” Our own Donald Maass is a strong advocate of this approach, and on a monthly basis he offers new ways for us to expand the emotional range and impact of our stories. (Thanks, Don!)
Bottom line: I’m now striving to think bigger when creating the conflict in my stories. But that made the inspiration I drew from Notting Hill more surprising, because just how high are the stakes in most romantic comedies? After all, this was a movie I selected for its lightness. Yet as my writer-mind analyzed the film, I couldn’t help but notice the emotional wringer it put me through.
Rom-coms don’t always do that. In a Matthew McConaughey interview I recently watched (part of an absolutely BRILLIANT series of interviews produced by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation), Matthew observed that the “emotional frequency range” of romantic comedies is often not very wide, due to the inherently light nature of these movies. Yet I felt that the writer of Notting Hill (Richard Curtis, whose amazing body of film work as a writer and/or director also includes Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary and my all-time fave Love, Actually) decided to push those stylistically prescribed emotional constraints to the absolute limit.
Raising the stakes (or Love, Magnified)
Instead of asking “What if the girl of your dreams walked into your bookshop?” Curtis asks “What if the girl of the whole world’s dreams – the biggest movie star in the world – walked into your bookshop?”
From that point on, every typical conflict gets magnified exponentially, as literally the entire world begins to watch the relationship unfold, and Hugh finds himself facing the challenge of attempting to date a woman who takes the phrase “out of his league” to a whole new level. No pressure, Hugh.
It’s a brilliant premise, and a perfect example of a “high concept” story – one that can be described in a single sentence. But Curtis doesn’t stop there. With the heightened emotional impact of a romance between an average Joe and the world’s biggest movie star, Curtis crafts a constant series of high and low points, all of which are exacerbated by the massive chasm between the separate worlds these two characters inhabit.
I’ve got algorithms – who could ask for anything more?
This repeated up-and-down cycle was what I really noticed for the first time during this most recent re-watching of the film. And I’m pretty sure I noticed that cycle because I’d just finished reading a really unusual book called The Bestseller Code.
Written by former acquisitions editor for Penguin Books Jodie Archer and University of Nebraska English professor Matthew L. Jockers, the book chronicles the authors’ efforts to apply data algorithms to analyze and identify commonly occurring components of bestselling fiction. In case that sentence made absolutely no sense to you, let me put that in more down-to-earth terms:
They fed the text of a bunch of bestselling novels into an evil supercomputer, and created a program to analyze what they had in common.
Okay, the computer wasn’t necessarily evil. And maybe not even all that super. But it sounded more dramatic, you have to admit.
With their findings, Archer and Jockers (who now work together as book consultants) hoped to develop the ability to analyze the text of unpublished novels to determine their likelihood to become bestsellers. I may end up devoting an entire WU post to this fascinating-but-VERY-nerdy book sometime in the future, so I won’t delve too deeply into it today, but suffice to say, it got me thinking.
One of the numerous fascinating things the authors discovered was that a couple of conspicuously high-performing books generated a rather specific “plot shape” – essentially a diagram charting the emotional highs and lows throughout the course of the novel.
Referring to a diagram like the one above, the authors observed that across all the books they analyzed, they found only “a handful of books that exhibit this regularity of emotional beat… The distance between each peak is about the same, and the distance between each valley is about the same, and finally, the distances between the peaks and valleys are about the same. This reflects a deep attunement to the kind of pacing that the market – and let’s be honest, it’s a global market for those books – seems to most enjoy.”
“In other words,” the authors maintain, books like this “have mastered the page-turner beat” (emphasis mine).
Their conclusion is that the rhythmic pattern of these repeated highs and lows helps create the “addictive” nature of that literary Holy Grail: the “book you just can’t put down.”
While these two authors are focused on analyzing novels, it seems that their findings might hold true for film as well: Notting Hill went on to become the highest-grossing British film released in 1999.
(Notting) hills and valleys aplenty
By comparison, most novels don’t have as many hills and valleys (which Archer and Jockers consider a possible weakness). And most romantic comedies definitely don’t, often opting for a simpler structure, with fewer arcs.
To wit, there’s typically an up moment when the two main characters meet and sparks fly, followed by a down moment when we recognize the seemingly major obstacle that keeps them from immediately falling in love (and that also keeps the movie from ending after just ten minutes), then a slow buildup as it becomes more clear that the two are totally meant to be together. This in turn is followed by a steep drop-off when Some Big Misunderstanding happens, threatening their relationship often to the point of seemingly destroying it. But then there’s one last upward arc, as one protagonist races (often literally) to catch the other before he or she is gone forever.
Formulaic? Possibly. But dammit, it works. Just ask Hugh’s accountant.
Admittedly, everything I just described in a typical rom-com does happen in Notting Hill. But there’s more. In addition to the larger boy-meets-unattainable girl arc, Hugh’s repeated interactions with Julia take him on a roller coaster of highs and lows, with the lows often crashing in just moments after the highest highs. He will have an amazing romantic moment with Julia, only to have his heart absolutely crushed by forces much larger than himself.
And we in the audience feel those highs and lows, imagining ourselves in similar dreamlike circumstances (falling in love with a big movie star), and then suffering the nightmare of realizing it can never be. But it’s the recurrence of this cycle that makes Notting Hill stand out: Each time Hugh has written off any possibility of being with Julia, she manages to reappear in his life, and we rinse and repeat.
It’s really a master class in balance and pushing the limits, as Richard Curtis manages to keep us within the light and humorous conventions that both define and constrain romantic comedy, while still pushing us further up and down the emotional scale than we’re used to – and doing it to us again and again. And again.
I think a big part of what makes it all work is Hugh Grant’s very British performance, where his character tries to remain blithe and seemingly detached, while his eyes betray the heartbreak he’s inwardly experiencing. I don’t know if I’m capturing it all with this written description, so if you haven’t seen Notting Hill (and have any appetite/tolerance for rom-coms), do yourself a favor and watch it!
Okay, so what IS it all about, Alfie?
I’m getting to that. And don’t call me Alfie. I guess these ruminations leave me with five main takeaways to share:
- Be open to inspiration from unlikely sources: even a late-night movie you turn to with the goal of switching off your brain.
- Even a “small” story has the potential for big, emotion-tugging conflict.
- Consider putting more ups and downs in your story – perhaps at regular intervals.
- Even a story constrained by genre conventions has room to push the boundaries.
- You’ve never had a roommate as bad as Hugh Grant’s roommate in Notting Hill.
How about you?
Do you have any examples of inspiration drawn from unlikely sources? Any rom-com revelations? Any idea what brand of toothpaste Julia Roberts uses?
Please chime in, and as always, thanks for reading!
[coffee]
Author of the novels Me Again (originally published by Five Star/Gale), and Tony Partly Cloudy (published under his pen name Nick Rollins), Keith Cronin (he/him) is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. Keith’s fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Scruffy Dog Review, Zinos, and a University of Phoenix management course. A native of South Florida, Keith spends his free time serenading local ducks and alligators with his ukulele.
Love this, Keith! (Also love Notting Hill.) Thanks for the advice re ups and downs in a story, perhaps a metaphor for the ups and downs of writing a novel that works in the first place.
My favorite recent metaphor: the fox in Fleabag.
See you in Salem!
Thanks, Mary!
I keep hearing about Fleabag – I need to check that show out.
And yes, the writing experience certainly IS filled with ups and downs. Sometimes lots of downs – but maybe that’s just me.
Looking forward to seeing you at UnCon!
Great stuff, Alfie, I mean Keith (Sorry)! Totally agree about keeping an open mind, particularly when looking across genres. Seeing how story works through another lens can really be enlightening.
Favorite scene from Notting Hill? The blind date with the Fruitarian.
Huge Grant: “So these carrots?”
Fruitarian: “Have been murdered, yes.”
Huge: “These poor little carrots. That’s beastly.”
But there are loads of gems there. Curtis is also a master of creating the ensemble of friends we all wish we were a part of. I guess during the movie, we are a part of it–getting their inside jokes, wanting to protect one another, etc.
Thanks for this. I’m just a little worried, though, that my wife will click over and see your post. It’ll be non-stop rom-com-o-rama around here if she does. I can hear it now: “Come on, just one more. It’s to help you with your writing!”
Thanks, Vaughn. And that’s MISTER Alfie to you, pal.
Amen to all the points you raised. The whole sequence of blind dates was painfully funny, and I was remiss for not pointing out the amazing ensemble cast that populates Notting Hill – as you said, a body of friends the likes of which most of us only *wish* we had.
Curtis is also great at taking us into the hearts and minds of people who may look and act very differently from ourselves – again, that body of friends offers a wide variety of “types,” each with their own very real problems.
And no matter how many times I’ve seen it, the scene where Hugh is dismissed and mistaken for a hotel room-service waiter is one of the most crushing romantic defeats I’ve ever seen captured onscreen, supported beautifully by the well-chosen soundtrack.
Clearly, I could go on and on. Ahem. Now where’s that blasted Man Card? I know I put it somewhere…
Keith–what a great post! Thank you.
What I especially like–in a piece that delivers from start to finish–is your use of a successful romcom for illustration. What makes this so effective is that you aren’t talking about the usual, grave-faced, humorless examples of extreme highs and lows, but real emotions generated by something essentially light. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.
In my view, this is especially valuable, because I think many misinterpret what you speak of at the beginning: “…most conventional teaching on writing more powerful stories urges us to dig deeper, giving our characters bigger problems with higher stakes.” In my view “digging deeper,” “bigger problems,” and “higher stakes” are usually understood in terms of physical or psychological disaster, collapse, horror, etc. That sends writers down a mine shaft, in which they must dig their way to some Ultimate Catastrophe.
Doing so IMO is also a rabbit hole. The key is not an extreme subject developed in extreme terms, but being able to mine any experience in such a way as to make it count in emotional terms. That’s what happens in the best romcoms, as well as a comedy of manners written by Jane Austen.
Thank you again. What you have to say is truly valuable for WU readers.
Thanks, Barry – those are kind words indeed, and much appreciated.
You raise an excellent point about how easy it is to assume that to add “bigger conflict,” we writers are obligated to increase the *scope* of that conflict. But you nailed it with this:
“The key is not an extreme subject developed in extreme terms, but being able to mine any experience in such a way as to make it count in emotional terms.”
Amen to that!
This is spot-on! In the realm of rom-coms, I think The Cutting Edge also delivers the repeated hill-valley pattern that you describe. Thanks for sharing your inspiration!
Thank you, Avery.
And OMG – you managed to reference a rom-com that I haven’t seen???
Wow, there may still be hope for me retaining my Man Card!
(as Keith rushes off to Amazon to check out The Cutting Edge….)
Enjoy! Be sure you see the one with Moira Kelly and D. B. Sweeney, not one of the sequels.
Cutting Edge is the story I tried to write about sailing. When I saw it the first time, I was both psyched to watch the same tale unfold on the big screen (with a different sport), and crushed that someone had already written the story I wanted to write. Those contradictory thoughts are, perhaps, the spectrum ends of creativity…
Keith,
One of my favorite rom-coms. I’ve actually been making a list of my faves, some of which I’ve watched half a dozen times. I’m looking at you, Love Actually. Great analysis of why they work. I’m not very good at breaking books or movies down and figuring out exactly what is the secret sauce that makes them work. You did a fabulous job!
Thanks, Densie – and if loving Love, Actually is wrong, I don’t want to be right!
I’m not an expert at breaking down movies or books, but I do feel it’s a learnable skill. My challenge – particularly with movies – is that I get sucked into the story and my suspension-of-disbelief kicks in. So I probably wouldn’t have noticed this aspect of Notting Hill without having already seen it eleventy-three times.
My brother, scriptwriter Douglas Eboch (Sweet Home Alabama) likes to note that when you want to raise the stakes, it’s about making it more personal to the main character. So in a thriller where people are in danger, it’s not a matter of having a stadium full of people killed versus a handful of people killed. Rather, it’s putting the main character’s loved ones in danger. The stakes have to be personal to that person.
(Check out his books, The Three Stages of Screenwriting and The Hollywood Pitching Bible, or his blog about script writing and the movie business, Let’s Schmooze.)
If I am ever stuck, blocked, crunched or hospitalized, I now know whom to call to ghost write my monthly craft analysis for WU.
Outstanding post, Keith. Copied, saved, studied, put to use. Thank you.
Whoa – that means a LOT, Donald.
Thank you. Seriously.
But since you brought it up…
I have a terrific idea for a REALLY exciting post, where I would examine the mythopoetical paradox inherent in the use of semicolons in the early works of Clive Cussler, drawing on the intrinsic contrast between textual subcultural theory and the predialectic paradigm of context, vis-à-vis the prognostication that preconceptualist capitalist theory implies that the media is intrinsically unattainable, given that art is distinct from language.
I think it will really get the WU audience whipped up, so let me know if you’d like to see a short 40-page outline on the topic, in case you ever need me to “sub” for you here at WU.
Hello? Are you still there, Donald?
Don?
Hello???
Keith–how the hell did you hack my hard drive and steal my three-volume WIP about Clive Cussler?? Shame!
Keith, this is dandy stuff. As Barry commented, there’s mineable fictional ore in so many of the ostensibly mundane encounters and quiet revelations of the everyday—our characters don’t need to slit their wrists or stop bathing or eat ground glass to evoke some truths and intrigue about existence.
And yeah, I spend a fair amount of time researching the rhythms of movies to see the patterns of where they grab you, release you for a breather and grab you again. Research, I tell you!
By the way, Julia doesn’t use toothpaste. Straight bleach. Good for the breath too.
Thank you Tom. I think this might be the first time I’ve had my work called “dandy,” and dammit, I like it.
Nice to meet somebody else who enjoys geeking out over what gives a story its rhythm and/or pace. Fascinating stuff, eh?
I’m just surprised to find myself still being surprised by a story with which I’m already so familiar. It reminds me just how many layers there can be to truly good storytelling.
After all the above comments, my only addition is thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!!!
Wow, Judith –
All I can say is you’re welcome, You’re Welcome, YOU’RE WELCOME!
:)
Keith, I loved this post so much and if you love rom-coms and don’t watch Bollywood films, you’re missing out. Bride and Prejudice is one of my all-time favorites (not sure now if it’s Bollywood but style is definitely it).
I find the stakes quite high because marriage is for life! Till death do us part. So it’s a pretty big deal getting hitched to the right person. All your future happiness is at stake.
I write for kids and the stakes (according to adults) aren’t always high. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting that goodnight kiss or a bowl of milk (if you’re a kitten). But we care because it *is* important.
So interesting about the analysis–that the highs and lows need to come at regular intervals. I’m curious about this book and will check it out. Thanks Keith.
Thanks, Vijaya!
Ooh, I love Bollywood, and yes, I’m a BIG fan of Bride and Prejudice – it’s on our DVD shelves and we’ve watched it many times. (I’m always game for any re-imagining of Jane Austen.)
As analytical as you are, I think you might enjoy The Bestseller Code. I think it does a pretty impressive job of melding technical theory with the more subjective realities of the publishing business. And the authors are good about admitting when they were surprised – positively or negatively – by what the data indicated.
But back to Bride and Prejudice: got any other Bollywood recommendations? If so, please share them!
Oh yes! Lots of films with Shah Rukh Khan. Ek tha Tiger has everything in it :) Recently watched Notebook. Basmati Blues. Shivaay.
And if you like historicals, they’ve done some luscious ones–Padmavati; Manikarnika (Queen of Jhansi).
Just this weekend we saw Yesterday! Such a lovely tribute to the Beatles. It’s been so great to see several Indian films in the theatre.
(Now that you have a new nickname, Mr. Alfie, I think you’ll have to cede your Man Card.)
I recently read Me Again (and enjoyed it!), and I also write what has been called “quiet” fiction… so I fully understand and appreciate your thoughts about going bigger on emotion. That said, there’s something about letting the reader do the work that appeals to me…
And apparently our last names are not the only thing we have in common: Your list of favorite rom-coms basically duplicates my own (and definitely watch the original Cutting Edge if you didn’t already do so last night). What I never stopped to think about is WHY those particular movies grab me. It’s so easy to blame/congratulate the fantastic casts assembled, especially with Love Actually, but one search for “other movies with Colin Firth” uncovers plenty of stinkers, too. The next time I watch NH or LA, I will try (and likely fail) to keep my perspective and look for those consistent patterns of rise and fall.
Also, not to go political here, but our current president seems to understand quite well the advantage of page-turner pacing. :)
Thanks for a great post!
This was a great post, and is even making me consider re-watching Notting Hill, which I did not love at the time it came out. :P Thanks so much for sharing your insightful observations and takeaways!