Boy Meets Girl

Back in college I saw a 1935 stage place called Boy Meets Girl. 

 

(Picture from here.)

 

It was what we would call these days a rom-com. It takes place in 1930s Hollywood with a failing leading man, a film producer, an unmarried, pregnant waitress, two script-writers, and the illegitimate baby the writers turn into a star.

 

It’s fun. I have not seen the Cagney film but the Wikipedia synopsis is pretty much what I remember. I’ll look for it.

 

Under the plot is the idea of a style of story: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. 

 

This has intrigued me ever since. I rewrote it as protagonist discovers target of desire, protagonist loses target of desire, protagonist attains target of desire.

 

Reframed in this way, it is a common story structure as either the main structure or as a thread within the main structure. For example, in the Netflix Wednesday show, a strong theme is Wednesday discovers friends, Wednesday loses friends, Wednesday gets friends. (For those familiar with the show, “friends” can be replaced with “Enid.”) This is the emotional arc of the show. 

 

In my own work, Jackie’s Boy is the story of Michael finding Jackie, Michael losing Jackie, and Michael getting Jackie. The rest of the book is wrapped around this armature. 

 

I think this is different from the Aristotelean Plot. According to Big A, there are two kinds of good plots: simple and complex. Simple plots involve a change in fortune and the characters response to this. There is usually an incentive moment—what we called at Clarion, an event— that triggers the cause-and-effect sequence of the plot. Complex plots involve a reversal of fortune and insight into one’s fate. The protagonist has more agency to change the plot.

 

As I understand it, in both of these plot types the change of fortune is outside of the protagonist’s control. In the boy-meets-girl paradigm, the chance element is only represented by the encounter to the target of desire. From then on, all agency relies on the protagonist, be they one or many. 

 

Hitchcock referred to a macguffin, an object of desire that has no intrinsic importance but is the attractant to the characters. The Holy Grail, Golden Fleece, and Maltese Falcon, all demonstrate a macguffin: the mystery and importance of these things reside only in the mind of the characters. Others believe that the macguffin must have importance to the audience (or reader) as well: the One Ring of LOTR, or the Lost Ark in the Spielberg film. In both of these cases, the macguffin has intrinsic importance especially when in the wrong hands.

 

LOTR and Raiders of the Lost Ark are both example of what I call big stories. Big stories involve the end of the world, good versus evil, light against dark. Small stories, on the other hands, are stories where the stakes are limited to the characters involved. I’ve written very few big stories—the closest I’ve come have been stories where the big events happen but as an afterthought consequence of the small stories. For good or ill, small stories are where I tend to live.

 

Boy-meets-girl is essentially a small story paradigm. It can reside within a big story—see Wednesday, above—but the stakes are local. Wednesday’s acquiring of friends has little bearing on the larger issues. The fact of her having friends by the end has an effect on the larger arc but the big story could have been told without it. 

 

These days, big stories are written with little stories embedded within them. That’s the current style—in Raiders the story of Indiana and Marian is important to Indiana and Marian but not to the Lost Ark itself. The best big stories are built that way. Heist films—Avengers’ Endgame and Ocean’s Eleven have big stories flowing right along without much in the way of small story support. (In the case of Endgame, the small story of loss motivates the big story but is ultimately left to one side when the heist gets going. It then returns at the end.)

 

Boy-meets-girl (so much less wieldy than protagonist-encounters-target-of-desire) is really built for the small story. It can be contorted to fit over a big story but it’s not often a comfortable fit. It’s not a coincidence that the small stories inside Raiders and LOTR are not boy-meets-girl but of a different style. In Wednesday, the BMG story is pushed to the background and emerges as needed to re-energize the characters and to introduce teenage angst as needed. (It is a story of high school, after all. What’s high school without teen drama?) The writers were careful to keep a little distance between the BMG elements and the big story of monsters, mayhem, and death.

 

I keep discovering the BMG paradigm in my own work and in the wild all the time. When you look at LOTR from the point of view of the One Ring, it’s BMG all the time. It’s either done straight—Gollum meets ring. Gollum loses ring. Gollum gets ring—or it’s inverted. As in Frodo gets ring, Frodo rejects ring, Frodo embraces ring. BMG is the small wheel that drives the ponderous architecture of both the novels and the film. 

 

Of course, it’s possible I’m projecting my own touchstone imagination onto works that don’t actually have it. Many times, we have phrases or magic words that mean worlds to us but have no real meaning to anyone else. 

 

That’s okay. Inspiration is not transferable. What inspires me might leave you cold. Your most important life affirming moment might be something I find trivial. 

 

It’s like the elephant dancing. The magic is not how clumsy or inept the inspiration is, but that it occurs at all.