Start with your target.

Your target is the moment you build to — that big reveal, big stand-off, joke on the scene, revealing look, twist — whatever pushes us stumbling forward, searching our hearts for more. This is the last moment in the novel, last beat in the scene, last beat in the act.

Drive the arrow of your story through the target where you want it to land. Find that last beat — of the story, of the scene, of the act — start with where you’re going.

Unless you experiment with rhythm and timing by placing your big moments in the middle or the beginning, your biggest moments should go last. Your end beats stand as booster rockets pushing us forward, constantly building tension and emotion, propelling us all the way past THE END to continue the story in our minds and in our hearts.

Instead of loading up your arrow and launching it, hoping it will stay on course and land where you want it, target these end beats first. Then, pull back — what happened right before the arrow nailed the target? What happened right before that? Follow the line of the arrow back all the way from where it hit its target to where you loaded your bow. You’ll find the path between target and pulling the string a lot shorter than it might have been had you started with the quiver.

I’ve been writing back to front for a long time — both within scenes and over entire scripts and novels — but it didn’t occur to me to write a post about it until I read this post at Screenwriting Foxhole in which Michael Lee discusses how to structure a scene — from back to front. Ensuring the last beat is caused by the beat immediately preceding it, which is caused by the beat preceding it, and so on. Like a director organizing a shot list, ensuring that every beat has a shot and that these shots flow in a tight, inter-dependent chain like a spine through the back of the scene.

Begin where you want to go. You’ll get there fast.

Before my dad disappeared to sail around the world when I was 11, I spent every other weekend with him. All he wanted to watch was war movies. I HATED war movies — I was a little girl. A girly-girl. Before my world exploded.

Now, all I watch is war footage — documentaries, YouTube videos, movies about Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s because I’m completing a pilot about Iraq — and thinking about turning the pilot’s cut file into a feature. But the fact remains, that I’m watching my dad’s movies now. I am awake to symmetries in my life. Motifs. There are no accidents.

My dad loved watching people blow stuff up. I love watching what happens to people when they get blown up. War thrusts our worst inwards outward. I am compelled by people losing that much, that quickly.

I posted this story on Twitter a few days ago, in which Capt. Alexander Allan discusses pictures from his new book Afghanistan: A Tour of Duty. One of his comrades had his leg blown off. His buddies found the leg some time later, wrapped in a sheet. They made sure it wasn’t booby-trapped and took it back to camp. They burned it, manning the fire in shifts. Each took his turn to say goodbye. They let go.

I can’t stop thinking of these soldiers burning the leg. Can’t stop thinking of what I’ve left behind, that needs burning.

I used to write slowly. As a novelist, I would meander, let myself go, simmer, get stopped up, go around in circles, find my way again and again. I still do that, I just do it very fast now.

If you’re on a deadline, but want to write a rich story fast, here’s a shorthand:

Every character gets an arc that hits at least three beats:

• We meet them when they’re low — or don’t know yet they’re about to take a big fall.
• They struggle with a new challenge.
• They change as a result.

Show each of these beats in a scene or scenes consisting of:

• a visual image
• an emotion
• a question in the mind of the audience — what comes next?

Weave these scenes together like a building conversation: each scene interviews the next, asking a more insistent question that’s only partially answered by the next, which answers a question with its own question in turn. Building in speed and intensity.

Every moment in your story is a great moment — if it’s not, lose it.

If you’re on a tight deadline, you can use this shorthand to develop a pretty tight story. Once you’ve got the story down, you can get profound.

Fucking is a feeling.

You don’t think “I should fuck that person.”

You have a feeling. An urge. You want to fuck.

This feeling carries us through a story. We buy emotionally. On page one, in the first few minutes of the movie — we buy in. We get turned on. We want to fuck.

Doesn’t matter what kind of story. It’s the feeling. That sense of drawing forward. Because we’ve seen something in there that’s mysterious, or vulnerable, or heroic — something small starting down the road to getting big. We get turned on. We want to fuck.

Give us something we want to fuck. We’ll go.

I love motifs. If there’s some law where the number of motifs in your story threatens to reverse the chemical ratio of metaphor to action, I’m the person to test it.

A motif is a detail that repeats through a story to draw attention to an idea or theme. The motif can be a word, phrase, color, character, monster, sign, place, image, way of describing something, way of talking, alliteration, simile, character trait, situation, anything. The point is that it repeats. Once it repeats it becomes a trail of breadcrumbs we leave to help the reader or viewer find depth and meaning in our stories. When motifs cross and combine, they reflect and magnify each other, drawing a map that points the audience down paths of allusions, partly inherent in the story and partly supplied by the audience’s experience. This is the theme.

I’ll use my Iraq pilot as an example to show how I use motifs. I decided to introduce a new motif in each act, like a recurring chord in a symphony, that, once introduced, would blend together in the end. Each act’s motif shapes the act, giving it a guiding metaphor to direct the action.

These are the ideas that take root in the imaginations of my characters in each act. They discuss them, they see evidence of them all around themselves, they see parallels to them in their environment, more importantly, they DON’T see parallels to them in their environment. These motifs show up in both subtle and un-subtle ways, as jokes, as images, as plot points, as looping topics of conversation.

Act 1:  Motif: Bloodshed.

Act 2: Motif: University of Texas Cheerleaders.

Act 3: Motif: Missing Humvee and Suicided Soldier.

Act 4: Motif: We Don’t Leave A Man Behind.

Act 5: Motif: Innards.

You don’t have to tell a serious story to use motifs — my sitcom pilot was standard network fare but also very motif-driven. You can bury them beneath the surface or not. What they give you is a deeper, more meaningful, more textural world.

When my Iraq pilot ends, I want the audience to be different.

They’ll be different because they shifted. Because the characters shift. The audience identifies with the characters, forms a bond with them that pulls them up and down through the piece, changes them as the character changes.

Stories help us feel what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes. They give us the gift of empathy, the gift of identifying from a different direction. A woman walks away identifying as a man.

You help your characters shift by making the powers that oppose them overwhelming. The more acute the opposition, the more we’ll feel the urgency of the situation, and the more vital and primal the bond we’ll form. That person struggles. I struggle. I understand how that person feels. A man walks away identifying as a woman.

In my pilot, male soldiers discover they have to work with women during active combat, and they feel dragged down, challenged, threatened, unsafe. The female soldiers feel unprepared, untrained, unwelcome, unsupported.

Most of them experience a shift. If the piece works, the audience identifies with them at the start and shifts along with them.

By the end, the characters circle near the feeling -

We are all women. And we are all men.

If the story works, my audience will feel that too.

Last year I wrote a pilot about modern day pirates that was set in Haiti. I chose Haiti because it’s one of the poorest countries on Earth — both left behind and close to home. I felt it was real life Sci Fi. The sense of place was an important part of the piece. Now Haiti has been destroyed a thousand times more — before it was a silent catastrophe in our midst, now it will be a devastatingly loud one. While I was writing, I felt frustrated because all I wanted to do was talk about it. And no one wanted to hear it.

Now I’m writing a pilot about Iraq, and everything’s that wrong over there feels overwhelming to me. Horrifying suicide rates among active duty soldiers and veterans. Sickeningly high sexual assault rates for female soldiers, by fellow soldiers — as high as 30%. Unnecessary civilian deaths. Unnecessary soldier deaths. Outrageously corrupt war profiteering. No one over there seems to know what we’re doing over there. This is all going on — and no one cares. No one wants to hear about it, no one wants to listen. No one gives a fuck. We are members of a democratic society who have orchestrated this, and by not rising up and expressing our outrage and ending this, we are responsible. A tragedy occurs in our midst, and we are responsible.

No one cares because the Iraq story is not acute. Like the Haiti story, it was just happening. It was horrific and terrible and outrageous, but there was no moment that was more horrific and terrible and outrageous than the next. There was no acute focus to the story, no lens to help us understand how to feel about it.

With Haiti, those people had always been crushingly poor and betrayed by corrupt leaders, right? How is one day different from the next? Many people have difficulty feeling empathy for people they don’t relate to — or they don’t find a way to relate to people whose plights aren’t right in front of them. Suddenly there’s a horrible earthquake — something that any of us might experience any day — it taps into our fears about our own safety — we could lose our homes just like they did, we could be wandering the streets just like them – then as we wallow in the disaster porn because it stirs up all those feelings so many of us yearn to feel every day but don’t have access to — empathy, understanding, fear, grief — feelings that get buried by everyday life’s efficiency and competency and need to look emotionally stable — disaster porn allows us to access all those feelings — and once accessed, we get it. Wait a minute, they were fucked before this horrible earthquake. They’ve been fucked for a very long time. I just wasn’t thinking about it. It took this acute story, the flurry of excitement, the urgency and concentration of focus centered on the need to find people, find shelter, find medical aid, find water, the sheer drama of it all — that’s what it took for us to care.

If there were a terrible earthquake in Iraq, would people care about the war?

The other big story this week has been the Leno/Conan/NBC war, with virtually everyone I know declaring for “Team Conan.” Both Team Leno and Team Conan are teams that do not hire any women writers. How is it possible that with all this media coverage, no one discusses that fact? If Conan O’Brien released a carefully worded statement declaring his intention to never hire women writers, there would be a public outcry. No one would join “Team Conan” then. However, by not declaring his intention but instead just doing it, no one calls him out on it, no one gives a fuck. It’s the Haiti, Iraq problem: the story is outrageous but not acute. People shrug it off as just the way it is. There’s no urgency, no face on the story — no highly qualified woman who should have gotten a job on the show and was told “we don’t hire women” walking out of the studio with a brave face. No disaster porn to allow people to access their empathy.

The lesson here is this: if you have an important story you want to spread, find a way to make it acute. Give it a face and a focus and make it urgent. Shape it into disaster porn.

Eating disorders are our safest, most acceptable way to commit violence.

My teenaged anorexia moved into bulimia at the end of my senior year of high school. I had won a full scholarship to Tulane University, so my family and I drove down to New Orleans to check out the school. The pressure on me had built to a breaking point:

• getting into the right college
• finding money for college
• not having friends
• not having boyfriends
• father not loving me
• staying skeletally thin so I would look on the outside the way I felt on the inside, so the world could see something bad happened here.

And there was more. Anorexics obsess about food — they don’t eat it, so they think about it and talk about it and cook it and encourage others to eat it. In New Orleans, the pressure met with all the food and the obsessing about food, and instead of eating as little as possible — I binged. I binged so hard and so thoroughly — on po-boys and beignets and jambalya and whatever came my way — and then I had to sit with that, all that. I had to sit with the fact of being nourished, which wasn’t who I was. So I forced myself to throw up for the first time.

It happened again probably the next day. Then maybe a week later. Then a few days after that. Then, like all addictions, it became a daily habit. Within months, it was multiple times a day. Very soon I was praying to God to help me stop.

I threw up every day for a year and a half.

I popped a blood vessel in my left eye from the pressure of constant vomiting. The white of my eye was blood red for a month. I liked it. I looked brutal. I looked brutalized. I looked on the outside the way I felt on the inside: used, worn out, beat up, violently ill. Abandoned. I was 18.

The summer between high school and my freshman year at Princeton, I babysat for this woman in my hometown whom I really looked up to. She had this energy that I admired — tough, confident, brave, bold, earnest. One day we sat in her kitchen, and she talked about how tough it is to be a woman. She said something like “I even used to have that bulimia thing, where you make yourself throw up.”

I don’t know whether she knew about me or not, but she must have seen I was struggling. With something. I felt ashamed.

My bulimia continued through my entire freshman year of college and through the following summer. It’s difficult to find places to binge and throw up multiple times a day on a college campus, but when you’re that addicted, you find ways. All addicts do.

I lost my gag reflex and resorted to more and more violent ways to purge. Sticking handles, butter knives, anything that would fit down my throat. I drank hydrogen peroxide for a few weeks, because the vet told us to give that to our dogs to make them throw up after they drank poison.

Once I had eaten a ton of spaghetti, and when I threw it up, the noodles hung out of my throat. I had to pull them out.

I started throwing up flecks of blood. I didn’t know how to stop. Virtually every session ended with me lying face down on the bathroom floor beside the toilet, eyes watery from the violence, mouth raw, wiping saliva and vomit from my chin with toilet paper or the back of my arm, praying to God to help me never to do this again. Begging God to never let me do this again.

Hours later I would do it again.

The binge/purge cycle is something no one fully understands, but here’s an attempt: you use too much of something that feels good (food or something else) to stuff down anxiety or despair or any unbearable thoughts or feelings. The harder, faster or more violent you stuff these feelings down, the harder and faster the recoil, which is when you need to purge. You’ve binged, and suddenly you’re sitting there with an unbearably stuffed gut — the very feeling you’ve spent most of your life avoiding, which is what lead to a bingeing mind-set to begin with. You think the food is the feelings, the fullness is the problem — if only you hadn’t binged, you wouldn’t be feeling this badly. If you get rid of it, it’ll all go away. So you purge, and for a little while, you do feel much better. The uncomfortable fullness is suddenly gone. You experience a sense of clearing, euphoria from purging — a release. All those feelings you tamped down with the food are gone now, as if the food was a sponge, and it all came up. But you’re still you, and the disquiet gathers again soon, depending on how quickly you’re cycling.

Here’s how it ended: my family began to realize what I was doing. Together with my boyfriend and my sister, they held a kind of intervention and said I wasn’t allowed to go back to college unless I got professional help for my eating disorder. My mom was very upset because she knew someone who died of bulimia — it has one of the highest death rates of any mental disease. They all watched me around the clock. I called the school and made arrangements to start the eating disorders recovery program the next week. I haven’t thrown up again since that day. I had problems with binge-eating and a disordered relationship with food  for years afterwards, but I didn’t throw up again. I just kept repeating the stuffing down of the cycle, without any of the joy of release. What kept me from purging again was I knew I was an addict: I knew once I started down that road again, I wouldn’t be able to stop. One drink for an alcoholic is the end, and one purge is another year in the toilet. Seeing my mom cry about how she didn’t want me to die was enough to sober me up.

Eating disorders are about wanting to be skinny, but not in the way you think. I had a father who didn’t love me and who always told me I was too fat, I was just like my mother whom he had left. My sister was wiry and tomboyish, and I was slow and feminine. He loved my sister, or felt affection for her. Because she was like him. So it is about love. But not just about love. It’s about identity, who you are. If you see yourself as fast and capable and competent and lovable, but your body looks like the opposite of all those things, you feel compelled to change that. But it’s more than that, too. If you’ve been violated, there’s no way to change what happened but to change your body. There are more reasons.

When I got back to college, I had an intake session with one of the eating disorders counselors, and I said “I haven’t thrown up in over a week, so I feel really good about that.”

She said “I feel sorry for you.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because now all that stuff you were forcing down is going to come up. Now things are going to get ugly for you.”

And they did.

Some time after that woman I admired told me about her bulimia, I ran into her at a hometown restaurant. I grabbed her kid and held her on my hip, and then I saw her. Her eyeball was blood red.

The more you explain, the weaker your position.

I was watching this show that had a character with a damaged, gravelly voice. But they didn’t explain it at first, and I thought it was great. It was subtle, textured storytelling. Because it opened up this little mystery within the show that could have lead in many different directions — but the point is it was sticky. It was another little surface to grab our attention, to make us think and wonder and fill in our own explanations. It was a little hook that didn’t matter that much at all, but it did, because it added up to the whole. Immediately I was like “huh, this battle-hardened commander guy has a ruined voice. Is that typical? Was he gassed in Vietnam? Do years of being exposed to the toxins of war do that to your voice? Is that supposed to symbolize the character?” A tiny moment lead me down a long path.

Then later, one of the voice-guy’s soldiers: “What happened to your voice?” “Throat cancer.” “Were you a smoker?” “Nope. Just lucky I guess.”

Clunk. They solved the mystery for us, instead of leaving it for us to do. They explained too much. They acted as journalists, rather than storytellers.

Here are ten different ways they could have handled that information better (not to be used in combination):

1. Never explain the character’s voice. This is the boldest choice, and one that probably wouldn’t fly with the network. But it’s most interesting because it allows us to fill in the gaps. When no explanation is given, the possibilities we come up with are far more dramatic than reality.

2. The character drops frequent references to throat cancer in a conscious manner. When this guy says something like “those insurgents are gonna feel like they just had chemo rammed down their throats” we’ll get it.

3. The character makes reference to throat cancer in an unconscious manner. Voice-guy would be talking about the situation and say something like “they’re like parasites that invade the organism. You don’t even know they’re there. You’ve always got to be on patrol.” We catch a reaction shot on the men to see if this registers on any of them — see them glancing at his throat, and wondering what happened to him.

4. Voice-guy speaks in a manner that really strains his voice. Juxtapose with other characters wondering if you can get throat cancer from the toxic chemicals associated with war. Never explicitly link the two, because that’s dull.

5. Voice-guy’s wife seems very concerned about his health. We don’t know why, or don’t find out why until she reveals it bit by bit.

6. Voice-guy takes medicine compulsively — or someone has to remind him to.

7. Voice-guy seems hyper-aware of certain elements in the environment that non-cancer survivors wouldn’t be aware of. Like, ducking below clouds of toxic smoke.

8. Take the other tack as the one above — voice-guy seems to have a death wish. He’s a Marine and he resents any reminders of his mortality. He rushes head-on into the fray, cancer be damned. Little reminders of his illness crop up, however, like his damaged voice and other physical reminders — getting winded, being unable to stand long periods — that tell us SOMETHING IS WRONG without having to say “I have cancer.” We get it.

9. Voice-guy lectures his men about not smoking and looking after their health. He even mentions that he never smoked, but that’s not the only thing you have to worry about.

10. Voice-guy envies a guy his age/rank who is in perfect health. We see that there is no reason for him to have a damaged voice. We see him feel the loss of his perfect health. We see him lose the attention and respect of his troops as he feels unable to speak to them. We intuit that he has a disease.

These may be too oblique, depending on the piece. But there are many ways the information could have been delivered that would have held our attention and kept us guessing. Telling us outright helps us change the channel.

You don’t want to know what I think. You want to know that I never stop worrying about my career, my future. I never feel safe.

You want to know that relationships leave me feeling unsettled, like I never know when the other shoe will drop. And that I keep editing this piece about relationships. That’s how uncertain I feel about my place in the world.

You want to know that I’m afraid I spend too much time alone. But that I feel like I can’t afford to spend any less time writing, if I have any hope of getting my career off the ground.

You want to hear about how I’ve been so focused, so determined, so intense this year, that I’m afraid a hardness is setting in. And how that doesn’t feel like who I am — how I’m soft and vulnerable by nature, or I used to be. Before my entire life became devoted to finding safety, securing my future. Finding writing jobs.

Maybe you want to know that I both love sex and fear it. I don’t want to feel that way. Maybe you don’t want to know.

Maybe you want to know that I feel adrift in the world. Distant and disconnected. I feel increasingly distant from my parents — both concerned about them and unable to help them. I’ve felt distant from my sister for many years.

Maybe you don’t want to know that this blog scares me — though it’s good for my inner life, my writing life, because here I force myself to get big and bold and confrontational and honest — it makes me feel naked in public, like I’m doing emotional porn — and it makes me feel connected to people in a way I don’t trust. When I share these carefully edited, raw glimpses inside me, it’s easy for people to think they like me. But I don’t show all the stuff you wouldn’t like. That’s the next step.

Story functions to deliver vulnerability: when it operates efficiently, we feel what you feel. Problems rise when you’re afraid to let us feel what you feel. Because of pride, shame, fear of exposure, ego, or because you don’t really know what you feel. You throw wrenches in the cogs or you drain the oil or you cover the whole machinery with a tarp because you don’t really want to get vulnerable. You resist the function of story, the very reason you set the machine to running.

Would you run up to a person and say “I have something really important to tell you — listen to this –” and then turn your back, cross your arms and scowl? Maybe you would, that tells a certain kind of story. But it doesn’t tell much. And that’s what you do when you tell a story that doesn’t deliver vulnerability. You shut off the audience, deny them access to you. You may still speak, but they can’t hear you.

Most protagonists are common folks, down on their luck, in the middle of crisis — we encounter them when they’ve lost a child, lost a job, hate their job, hate their spouse, can’t find love, hate their parents, don’t have parents, don’t have a country — and then something really bad happens to them, the action of the story. They’re low to start because they’re vulnerable, so we can access them. In stories, characters’ external circumstances reflect their internal circumstances. This is true of life as well. If you want to show that a character feels distant and disconnected, have her write a blog post like this one. Well, maybe not — the act of writing is difficult to dramatize. Perhaps have her attempt to teach these things to a mentoring student who has contempt and doesn’t listen and then have her emerge to find her car has been stolen. And she doesn’t know who to call.

If you did one thing today that felt like a risk, where you felt exposed, where you left yourself open to criticism in public, you left a placeholder in your heart that keeps that spot open when you sit down to tell stories. You drive wedges in there day after day to keep your heart open. Let your story machine function as it should: remove the wrenches and tarps, replace the oil. The story that pops out will run fast, function on max capacity.