JUNE, 2018
IT’S ALL ABOUT HER HUMANITY
By: Alice Orr
Mike Nichols was a
master storyteller, one
of the best who ever
lived, in my opinion. I
saw him in an inter-
view once where he
was asked to name
the most important
element in a story. His
answer was this. “All we care about is the
humanity.”
He was saying we must put the core
of what makes us all human into the
characters in our stories. Their dreams
and hopes. Their disappointments and
losses. Especially how they FEEL about
their dreams, hopes, disappointments
and losses. All portrayed in well-written
scenes.
In Nichols‟ film Heartburn, from the
novel and screenplay by another great
storyteller, the fabulous Nora Ephron,
humanity is at the burning heart. Rachel
Samstat spends the entire story trying to
get into, get through, and eventually get
out of the marriage of her hopes and
dreams. She is toppled into disappoint-
ment, one she creates for herself by an
error in judgment.
Her blunder sets her up for what
feels at the moment like the most devas-
tating loss of her life, the discovery that
her husband Mark Forman has been un-
faithful. Let me emphasize that Rachel
FEELS like his infidelity is the greatest
loss of her life and this is what matters.
How the situation FEELS to the charac-
ter. How what happens to her impacts
her humanity.
We may know she is better off with-
out this lying, philandering so-and-so, but
she doesn‟t FEEL that truth. She tri-
umphs, so to speak, in the end because
she comes to grips with that truth, and
we FEEL that triumph with her. We also
FEEL her heartache. We FEEL her hu-
manity.
20
The entire story really belongs to
Rachel Samstat. It could have been titled
The Adventures (or Misadventures) of Rachel
Samstat. Similarly, each of our own stories
could be titled The Adventures of
________ (fill in the name of your story
heroine). Or more accurately The Emo-
tional Adventures of ________.
In the romance genre in particular,
our audience, our readership, cares most
about the humanity of our heroine, and
how that humanity acts itself out in our
story. How her humanity comes to life
on the page in the way she behaves and
talks and most of all FEELS. In other
words, what our readers care about most
is our heroine‟s Emotional Truth.
Emotional Truth is what‟s really go-
ing on in your story. The real, underlying
truth of what is happening to your hero-
ine, and all of your characters. What your
characters allow us to see and hear on
their surfaces can conceal what they are
truly feeling. Great stories are all about
TRUE FEELINGS REVEALED.
This is exactly like real life, and real
life is the mother lode from which you
mine your own emotional truth and re-
fine it into storytelling treasure. The pre-
cious coins of that treasure are the deeply
felt emotions at the beating heart of your
story, the deeply felt emotions that make
your reader feel deeply too. Like we feel
for Rachel Samstat, because we recognize
her heartburn and her heartbreak, be-
cause at one time or another it has most
likely been our own.
I write romantic suspense novels.
Scary things happen in my stories. In my
latest novel, A Time of Fear & Loving, my
heroine, Amanda Miller Bryce, is terror-
ized by a brute. That same thing hap-
pened to me once. Fortunately, Amanda
and I both survived. In the meantime, as
I wrote the story, she and I both bene-
fited from my emotional truth of that
awful experience.
We shared the po