August 19, 2025 • 40 mins
More than a year ago, someone recommended I read the memoir called How to Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key. It reminded them, in some ways, of my memoir from 2017 about a marriage crisis, called Indestructible.
It took me more than a year to hit “play” on the audible file, but by the time I started it, I also finished in a matter of a few days.
The speed at which I consumed the book, however, does not necessarily reflect how I felt about the story. There are certain elements that must be present in a narrative in order for it to feel complete. I detail these in my book, Write Your Story and teach the framework in my workshops by the same name.
Some of these elements were, in my honest opinion, missing from this text.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I'm going to do
something that I've done a couple of times before, but
i haven't done in a while, which is to review
a book that I read recently. Not from the standpoint
(00:44):
of you should go buy this book or you shouldn't
go buy this book, but really from the standpoint of,
how are the elements of storytelling present in this book?
How are they working or maybe not quite working? Hoping
that this conversation will help you. If you are someone
who has a personal story that you would love to tell,
maybe you have an idea for a memoir. You want
(01:06):
to put your story, something you've lived through into words.
You're trying to create the structure. You're trying to get
some momentum on it. You're trying to get started writing,
and you're having a hard time really understanding how to
put the thing together. I think reading this book and
talking about it through the lens of what's working and
what's not working is going to help anybody who has
(01:26):
ever considered taking a story from their life and turning
it into a piece of writing. So that's really who
this episode is. Four. I'm not coming at this author,
and I say this, I give this caveat because this
is a book that came out a couple of years ago.
It came out in twenty twenty three. It has been,
for the most part, as far as I can tell,
a very beloved book. People talk about this book like
(01:47):
it's the best book that they've ever read. I'm sure
this book has really helped people. And there are a
handful of reasons for that, and I'll go through what
those reasons are, like what's really working about the way
that this author approaches the story. And then there are
also a handful of things that I think could have
been done better, and if those elements were present in
the narrative, that the narrative would have been even more helpful,
(02:09):
even more gripping, even more honest, and even more transformative.
For the reader. And I'll get into all of this
in just a minute. But the book was recommended to me,
probably over a year ago by a friend of mine,
and I added it to my Audible and then I
just never really got around to reading it, in part
because the subject matter doesn't really apply to me all
that much. I'll say more about that in just a
(02:30):
second here. But the book was recommended to me because
it's just such an incredible story, and it reminded this
person of the book that I wrote called Indestructible, which
feels like a lifetime ago that I wrote that book.
I do see the connection this person was making. There
are parallels and elements of it that are are somewhat similar.
I want to unpack that. But the subject matter isn't
(02:51):
all that applicable to me, and so I think I
put off reading it for a while, and then it
just popped up in my recommended I'd saved it on
my wish list, I find started listening to it via Audible,
and to be honest, I almost gave up on this
book after about I don't know, like twenty minutes of
listening to it. Sometimes the first couple of pages of
a book if it doesn't satisfy the requirements for what
(03:13):
I know needs to happen in the first part of
a book, I will abandon reading it, and yet with
a memoir, almost always i'll read from start to finish.
Even if I don't love the book, I will like
force myself to kind of plow through it, mostly because
my brain is always thinking, what is it that isn't working?
And I'm using this as like a bit of a
(03:33):
school room for myself to think about how I want
to put together my next book. So I'm using it
as a learning opportunity. Even if the book isn't my favorite,
if I'm not like really gripped by it, if I
can already see that it's missing some elements, I will
usually with a memoir hold on until the very end
so that I can understand, like, what was the missing
(03:54):
element here? And that's exactly what I did with this book.
The book is called How to Stay Married. It's written
by Harrison Scott Key. It came out in twenty twenty three,
and like I said, when the book came out, and
since the book has come out, as far as I
can tell, the book has been very, very very well received.
It is a book about a man who discovers that
his wife is having an affair, and the entire book
(04:14):
is him trying to unravel what's happening in the affair
and trying to, as the title suggests, stay married to
his wife. And as the title suggests, he does stay
married to his wife. This is one of the things
that I think really works about the book is that
he sets that arc for you from the very beginning.
You know, because of the title of the book, that
this man is going to stay married, and throughout the
(04:34):
book you're wondering how on earth could he possibly stay
married because of the mess that he and his wife
are in. In my opinion, because of how he talks
about his wife. I don't love the way he talks
about her. It is pretty condescending and demeaning, And so
the whole time I'm reading, I'm going like, how on
earth are these two people going to stay married? And
(04:55):
so that from that standpoint, it's a great hook. It
really does draw you into the story. You're asking yourself,
how are these two people going to stay married? And
what's motivating you to turn the page from one page
to the next is really answering that question, like what
is going to have to happen in order for these
two people to find their way to even liking each other.
(05:17):
I mean, it just feels like so impossible at the
beginning of the book, and I think this is one
of a few reasons why the book has been so
well received, because for people who are looking for some
sort of hope or solace inside of a marriage crisis,
I think the minute that they open to the first page,
they're finding exactly what they're looking for. They're finding someone
(05:39):
else who has been through what they've been through. They're
finding someone else who feels the way that they feel,
and they're finding Harrison scott Key, who really is a
great writer. I mean, he has an amazing ability to
turn a phrase. And that's not true of every single writer.
Not every single writer has a way with words, like
choosing the exact right word and the exact right moment
to really bring the point home. Not every single writer
(06:02):
has that gift. And yet I think in the case
of this book, my argument would be that Harrison Scott
Key leans so much on that ability to turn a
phrase that the structure of the story gets a little
bit lost, in my opinion, and I'm going to unpack that.
So I'm going to defend my position here because I
think I might be in the minority of people in
(06:23):
terms of how they feel about this book. Going back
to one other point that I brought up a second ago,
the parallels between Indestructible and How to Stay Married, I
do see the parallels there. In the case of Indestructible,
the story turns out very differently. I don't stay married,
But in terms of how the story begins a marriage
in crisis, I can totally understand why this person was like, Oh,
I bet you would really love this book, and you know,
(06:45):
I'm not in a place in my life where my
marriage is in crisis. In fact, what I shared on
last week's episode is that of all the areas of
my life, my marriage is probably the easiest for me.
And I don't say that with any kind of arrogance
or pride. There are other parts of my life that
are definitely struggling where I'm not thriving, as I talked
about last week. But for me, my marriage is a
(07:06):
place in my life where a I've gotten kind of lucky,
Like my husband and I found each other and we
just are extremely compatible. My husband is well He's a
nine on the enneagram if you know the Enneagram. He's
a very agreeable person. I have to almost like work
to draw out of him his stronger opinions. He does
have a bit of an eight wing, so he does
(07:26):
have strong opinions, but he has what I call a
long fuse, meaning like usually you won't hear from Matt
about his strong opinions. He just will kind of go along,
go with the flow, you know. He gives me like
lots of leverage, lots of space to just be myself
and do my thing and have you know, my opinions.
And then after a long fuse, he sometimes will have
(07:47):
a moment where he's like, no, I really care about this.
I'm putting my foot down. And he does have a
bit of a stubborn streak to him. But the way
that we move and breathe together just really works. We're
extremely combatible, we live well together, get along really well.
We like a lot of the same things. We entered
into our relationship later in life. Like we were not
young when we entered into relationship. I think I was
(08:09):
like thirty six when I met him, and he was
maybe thirty nine. We met in twenty seventeen, So I
don't know, I have to go back and do the math,
but I think it was thirty six and thirty nine
or maybe that was our Those were our ages when
we got married. So anyway, we met a little later
in life, just meaning that we had made a lot
of mistakes, we'd already lived a lot of life, we'd
already you know, just like had a lot of experiences
(08:29):
in the world and grown into the people that we
are today who just happened to be extremely compatible. So
that it's partly just luck. It's partly I will give
us some credit that both of us had done a
lot of emotional and psychological work before we met each other.
We had really worked to figure out who we are
and what was important to us and what mattered to us,
(08:51):
and how to set boundaries and how to stand up
for ourselves and how to communicate clearly and you know,
how to clean up what was on our side of
the street, and how to apologize and how to fight fairly,
and so many different things that by the time we
came together and we're practicing those things together, you know,
we just kind of meshed well together. And also another
thing is we had a lot of support. We have
(09:13):
a lot of privilege in our lives. We've both done
really well financially in our adult lives. We immediately when
we were starting to talk about maybe getting engaged and
moving in together, we hired a therapist and started meeting
with a therapist together. Not because anything was going wrong
in the relationship, but just because we wanted to build
a really sturdy foundation for where we were headed. So
we started meeting with a therapist weekly. We had that
(09:35):
moving into the season of living together, moving into the
season of marriage, we were very well supported. We have
tons of friends who have healthy relationships around us. We've
gotten lots of really great models, So we just have
in that area of our life a lot going for us.
In a way where the topic of a marriage crisis
doesn't really resonate with me on a deep level, but
(09:56):
it does because I have been through a marriage crisis before,
if that makes any sense, Like, yes, I totally get this,
I've lived through this before. My story turned out differently,
but also not all that differently, because even though in
the case of this memoir, these two people were able
to reconcile with one another, I feel like I did
very similar work wasn't able to reconcile with my ex husband,
(10:18):
but was able to reconcile in this way with Matt.
Where now we have this like really sturdy, supportive, strong
relationship that I mean, I hope Harrison's got key and
his wife have I don't know that I feel confident
in what their relationship is like now based on how
the story wrapped up, which is one of the things
that I'll talk about. But let me start from the
(10:39):
beginning in terms of a review of this book. And again,
this review is not from the standpoint of like is
this a good book or is this not a good book?
This review is purely from the standpoint of what I
teach and write your story, the elements of story that
really make a story work, what you ought to be
thinking about as you put your personal story together into
a piece of writing. And I just want to use
(10:59):
this story as an example of what works and what
doesn't work. The number one thing that I'm looking for
when I open up a memoir or when I listen
to the first couple of paragraphs of a memoir is
a sign immediately of a character transformation. And if you
don't know what I'm talking about, you can pick up
a copy of my book, write your story. You could
go back to the first season of this podcast and
(11:21):
listen to the first I think twelve or fourteen episodes
where I unpack each element that is important in a story.
One of those elements, and maybe I would put this
at the very very tippity top. The most important element
of any story is a heroic transformation. So you have
a character of a story who needs to change from
(11:43):
the beginning of a story to the end of the story.
Otherwise there is no story. It's not interesting, nobody cares,
nobody wants to engage. And also, like a personal story,
loses the essence of inspiration. If there is no personal transformation,
you can tell the wildest story in the whole wide world.
And if there's no personal transformation, it's really not that
(12:06):
interesting of a story. We're listening to a story, we're
reading a story, We're tuning into a story to know
how does this person change they go through this horrific
set of circumstances. But if they're the same person at
the end of the journey as they were at the
beginning of the journey, then what's even the point. What's
the point of the story. The point of the story
(12:27):
is the heroic transformation. So you might be saying, well,
you don't really get to know the heroic transformation until
the very end. And yet a really great author, someone
who knows how stories work, is going to set the
arc for you by telling you at the beginning of
a story how the hero changes, by alerting you, giving
you little breadcrumbs showing you that this transformation is present,
(12:53):
it's taking place, it hasn't happened yet, but it's going
to happen. And so it is the light at the
end of the horizon that pulls you and draws you
through the story. In the case of How to Stay Married,
I would say that the breadcrumb that pulls you through
the book is the idea that this couple stays married,
and so that's the transformation. I think that the author
(13:15):
has identified and that they're drawing you towards, like, we're
going to stay married, and so stay along for the
ride to see how we stay married. In my opinion,
that does not satisfy the need of a story for
a heroic transformation. Now that hero in this case does
(13:42):
transform in certain ways, and one of the ways that
he transforms is by becoming a bit of a better husband,
like on a practical level. From the beginning of the
story to the end of the story, he becomes more
involved in the home. He becomes a better dad, he
becomes more involved with his kids. He talks about pack lunch.
You know. At the beginning of the story, his wife
is depressed. She's kind of like overwhelmed, she's burnt out,
(14:08):
she's maxed out. She's doing all this stuff at home.
He's really out in the world building his career, building
this amount of success for himself and for his family,
although it really feels like more for himself than for
his family. And by the end of the story, he's
much more involved at home. He's, like I said, packing lunches,
He's doing dishes, he talks about he's there for bedtimes,
(14:30):
he's showing up for things for his kids. He's more
just practically involved in the home. So I do think
that transformation is clear and takes place, But even that
transformation doesn't become present in the story until about three
quarters of the way through the book, which again, in
my opinion, doesn't fully satisfy what is needed in order
(14:52):
to grip a reader's attention from the very beginning of
the story when I'm looking for when I first open
a book, when I read the first couple of paragraphs,
is something that alerts me that this person is not
the same at the end of the story as they
are at the beginning of the story. So the main
way to alert the reader to a character transformation is
(15:13):
through what I call narrator voice. And narrator voice is
the voice of the wise transformed hero, sort of calling
to us from the present, telling us about what's happening
happening now. So it's this sense that like back then,
I didn't know what I know now. If I had known,
(15:34):
I would have done things differently, But here's what I
did because I didn't know any better. That sense that
there's two different versions of the narrator. There's or not
even really the narrator. The narrator is the wise transformed voice.
The hero is the present day version of the character
(15:55):
of the story who's making the choices that they're making
in the present moment. And about heroes of stories, one
thing that we know to be true about heroes of
stories is that they're incredibly likable characters because they're broken
and flawed, just like us and so at the beginning
of the story, we need to both know that this
hero is deeply flawed. We need to know that they
(16:15):
are broken. We need to know that they don't know
all the answers. We need to almost be screaming at
them on the screen, like how could you do that?
How could you not know? How could you think that?
And then we also need to have this sense that
by the end of the story, those flaws have changed,
have softened, are different somehow, or are at least seen
(16:36):
in a new light and with a different perspective. They
don't have to be fixed, we don't need to be
perfected by the end of the story, but there needs
to be a sense that there's an awareness, a self
awareness that's a great word, a self awareness of those
flaws that makes us see them in a different light.
And one of the things that I wanted to mention
from How to Stay Married is there's an entire chapter
(16:57):
where Harrison Scott Key goes through a list of his flaws.
I'm the vantage point of his wife, and I think
this is a step in the right direction of endearing
us to the hero of the story by inviting us
into the flawed parts of his character. But the part
of it that didn't work for me is it didn't
feel like his perspective on those flaws was really articulated.
(17:20):
I don't know if he does have perspective on those
flaws as a person, but in the text, it didn't
feel like the perspective on those flaws was really well articulated.
I didn't personally feel like his perspective on why would
it be so for just as one example, why would
it be so heartbreaking and painful for his wife to
(17:41):
be the only one doing dishes for years upon years
upon years upon years. How might that feel for his
wife to be in that place. I didn't feel like
that was really unpacked or explored. And you know, later
in the book, I'm jumping around a little bit later
in the book, in the last couple of chapters of
(18:02):
the book, after the affair happens a second time and
after they're able to reconcile, I'm giving the book away,
but you kind of saw this coming anyway. There's like
a chapter or maybe two chapters at the very end
of the book where he does, it seems like, start
to explore some of this, But from the standpoint of
(18:22):
storytelling structure, that exploration really needed to begin in the
very very beginning of the book. It needed to be
introduced much much earlier, in my opinion, not without giving
too much away, but really letting the reader know, like
a different, more mature, more wise version of this man
is present at the end of the book, and that's
what's drawing us through the story. We're walking in that direction,
(18:45):
at least for me, And maybe part of this is
being colored by the vantage point of the wife and
really understanding what it is like to be saddled with
more of the domestic duties than husbands tend to be
charged with, and the feeling of what it's like to
be left at home alone with child rearing responsibilities and
(19:09):
domestic labor while husband goes out to breadwinn, and earn
and make a name for himself, and especially with his
career as a writer. He not only is you know,
just going out, it's not like he's going out and
building houses every day. Like he's going out and earning
a paycheck, yes, but also also making a name for
himself and doing a ted talk and traveling all over
(19:30):
the place and you know, earning the attention and the
accolades of the world and that feeling of being left
behind at home to do the less glamorous activity of
child rearing. I'm not saying it's not I'm not saying
it's any less important. It's definitely not, but the less
glamorous duties of laundry and dishes and cleaning, and you know,
(19:54):
constant meal prep and constant just like breaking up fights
and sibling squabbles and all of that stuff. I didn't
really feel by the end of the book like he
deeply understood why that would be so painful for his
wife and why she might have made these choices that
she did in light of how he was showing up
(20:14):
as a spouse. He did admit to some flaws. I'm
not saying he didn't admit to any flaws, but it
seemed like his assessment of why his wife had the
affair was more about her trauma, her upbringing, her sin,
her misunderstanding. And the other piece worth mentioning is that
this is written from a Christian vantage point, so that
also probably colors their view of the situation and also
(20:39):
maybe my response to the situation. So I'm admitting that
there might be some bias here, but in my opinion,
it didn't really feel like the transformation of the main
character was very well fleshed out. It felt more like
the character the main character in the story was the
marriage and it was about saving the marriage went from
being a bad marriage to a good marriage. But did
(21:01):
he go from being a bad husband to a good husband,
or from being an unseelf aware person to a self
aware person. I wasn't really all that convinced that he
had had that transformation. I'm not saying he didn't. He
may have, but I wasn't very convinced as the reader
that he was different at the end of the story
from what he was at the beginning of the story.
So to me, this was the first problem with the
(21:24):
narrative structure was that there was no clear transformation of
the hero in every story. If you're taking a story
from your life and you're putting it on to the
paper and you're wanting to share this story with other people,
the story has to have a hero. It has to
have a main character. That main character has to be flawed,
and that character, that hero has to go through a
(21:45):
clear transformation from the beginning of the story to the end.
And let me add one more thing to that list.
That transformation has to be communicated immediately at the beginning
of the story so that the reader knows, oh, what
transformation is happening. And I'm walking toward the light at
the end of the tunnel. That is the transformation, That
is the thing that is drawing me through the book,
and it is the Yeah, it's the light at the
(22:07):
end of the tunnel that I'm walking toward. If that
isn't present, then it really doesn't endear us to the
main character. We don't really want to follow their story,
and we feel like kind of opting out, taking the
nearest exit off of this particular freeway, which I did
feel like several times during this book. The only reason
I finished the book a couple reasons. I finished the book.
(22:28):
Number one, because it was recommended to me and because
of the parallels to my own story of divorce. Number two,
because of this episode, because I wanted to stay engaged
so that I could unpack this for you and for
myself as I think about writing a next book. And really,
those are the reasons that I stayed engaged. Otherwise, I
think from the very first ten pages of the book,
(22:50):
I probably would have checked out. I didn't get the
sense that this person was going to change, and because
of that, it didn't feel like that interesting of a
story to me. The transformation of the marriage didn't compel
me the same way that the transformation of the husband
might have or the transformation of the wife. I'm not
putting the onus of responsibility on him over her. I mean,
(23:11):
she did make the decision to have the affair and
to cheat and to step outside of the marriage, but
it's not her story. If it were her story, she'd
be telling from her vantage point and she would get
to share her own lens that she sees this through.
But it wasn't her story. It was his story, and
so a story told from my vantage point can't be
(23:33):
I'm a victim. You know, my wife had trauma and
she made this decision and it ruined my marriage. But
you know, thanks to God, like we pulled it off
in the end. That can't That's not a story. A
story is I went through this difficult thing. It changed me.
I'm different now than I was before. And here are
all the ways that I've changed. Here's how this has
(23:54):
changed my perspective of literally everything that I look at.
That's a story. The second thing that I I think
was missing from this narrative structure this particular book was
a guide. And to be clear, Harrison scott Key has
several friends who step into the narrative and who are
(24:14):
supportive to him, but none of them, in my opinion,
meet the conditions of the guide. The guide. The role
of the guide in the story is the guide comes
in to help the hero win the day because the
hero cannot achieve what they're trying to achieve without the
help of the guide. If they could, they would have
done it already. If the hero could achieve what they
(24:35):
wanted to achieve, they would have done it already. So
we intuitively know that the hero cannot do that without
someone to help them shift their perspective. And the guide,
in my opinion, doesn't enter the story until the last
two chapters of the book. And so even though he
has these friends, he has a pastor, he has a
(24:56):
handful of friends who are extremely supportive to him, he
doesn't have someone who comes into the story to shift
his perspective, to help him see himself differently, to see
his wife differently, to see the situation differently. He has
a handful of like what I would call villains and
I'll get to the villain concept more here in a minute,
because I really want to unpack that. But he has
a handful of people who shift his paradigm by showing
(25:18):
him how he doesn't want to be. Like, he has
a pastor at a big church that they're going to
who offers to put his wife through what is it called,
like their church process of rebuke, basically like bring her
in front of the elder board and excommunicate her from
the church. And he's like, no, no, no, I want
to That's not how I want to approach this situation.
(25:39):
I want to approach it with much more grace. So
that's a viewpoint that he has, a standpoint that he has,
but it's not a transformation, and that person, although it
helps him clarify the pastor helps him clarify how he
sees the situation, it doesn't qualify as a guide. Now.
A guide needs to come into the story and say, like,
you've been trying to do it this way, but I'm
(26:00):
telling you that's never going to work. This is what
you're going to have to try instead. And there is
no guide in the story until the very last two chapters,
when again after the second kind of fallout with his wife,
they go back to therapy, and then the therapist does
begin to act as a guide. And in my opinion,
those last I think it's a chapter or two chapters.
I can't remember because I listened on audible, but those
(26:23):
last couple of chapters of the book are almost the
narrative arc that I. If I were writing the book,
I would have followed the arc of those last two chapters.
I would have entered the story at that first day
in the therapist's office with his wife, and that would
have been the alla's last moment. I would have come
back to that moment again at the end of the story,
and I would have built the narrative arc around that moment,
(26:46):
because the therapist is the guide. The therapist is the
one who shifts their perspective. In my opinion, they would
not even still be married if it weren't for that therapist.
And yes, all of those other things matter and you
can touch on them, but this to me wasn't believable
because there was no guide guiding the here. And it
makes sense like there's no real transformations, there's no real guide,
(27:09):
there's no real guide to offer him the transformation. So
there's no real transformation of the main character. There's no
real guide. And the third thing I want to talk
about is the villain and the story, because it's not
something that I wrote about in much depth in Write
(27:32):
your Story, because a story does not require a villain.
Many stories have villains. Villains are present in many of
our personal stories, and I've recorded an episode before on
what to do with the villain in your story, But
a villain is not a required element of a story.
A story can operate with or without a villain. A
story can operate with a crisis and doesn't need a villain.
(27:54):
But oftentimes we feel that these are there are these
villains in our stories, and oftentimes there are villains in
our stories. One of the things that I think didn't
work about this particular narrative is that the author speaks
about his wife as if she is the villain of
the story, and he speaks about her so negatively. In
(28:14):
my opinion, again and this is coming through my lens,
the way he talks about her is so off putting
to me that I wondered for most of the story
why on earth she would ever stay married to him.
I just did not love the way that he talked
about her, and then it makes it really challenging for
the reader to flip their perspective about this supposed villain
(28:36):
of the story by the end of the story, because
you have built her up to be so villainous and
so evil and so hateful, and having done all these
awful things, how am I supposed to just immediately flip
my perspective about her in a matter of chapters. And
so the takeaway from this is that the villain and
the story can't become not the villain. If you're going
(28:56):
to paint someone as the villain, they have to stay
the villain. Two people in this story have to stay
exactly the same no matter what, the villain and the guide.
The guide doesn't change and the villain doesn't change. The
hero is the only one who changes. And that's how
you know who the story is about. It's how you
know who the main character is in the story, because
the hero is the one who transforms. The villain doesn't transform.
The villain doesn't change. So if you're going to paint
(29:17):
your wife as the villain, she can't be your wife
by the end of the story because otherwise we're going
to be rooting against her. And there's a narrative technique
called save the Cat. This is not for me. This
is from a famous screenwriter named Blake Snyder who's no
longer with us, but who wrote a book called Save
the Cat. Actually, there are a series of books called
Save the Cat that have been One was written by him,
(29:37):
and then a bunch have been written by students of
his who have followed in his footsteps. The concept of
save the Cat is if you want someone to love
a character, if you want them to love a hero
on the screen, you have to have a moment where
that hero does something selfless and unexpected in order to
endear that character to the reader, to the viewer. So
(30:01):
if a hero goes to save a cat, and they
maybe put themselves in danger to save this, you know, precious,
vulnerable creature, then that act of selflessness is going to
endear the hero to us. We're going to end up
loving the hero more because of that act of courage.
So you can use this narrative technique to make your
(30:23):
reader really fall in love with you, or to make
your reader really fall in love with another character in
the book. And yet there's no moment in how to
stay married in my opinion where his wife saves the cat.
There's no moment where you go like, oh, thank god, Okay,
I love her again. There is a moment at the
end of the story where he flips the script and
allows her to write a chapter. But I didn't feel
(30:45):
like it did. It didn't do enough for me to
let me into her world and to help me understand
why she made the choices that she made. Although you know,
as a woman, I can sort of understand why she
made the choices that she made, especially hearing the way
he talked about her, the way he talked about the marriage,
the way he talked about his career, it just all
felt a little degrading to me. It all felt kind
(31:07):
of like he looked down on her. He didn't really
see her as an equal to himself. It was subtle,
but I felt that that was there, And so for
most of the story I was going like, yeah, I
can understand, not the cheating part. I actually feel like
the you know, if she had the maturity and the
responsibility and the courage, she could have said to her husband,
(31:28):
I don't want to do this anymore. I went out
of this marriage, and that would be the more courageous
way to exit the relationship. She didn't have that, And
you know, again, like without getting into the weeds, a
lot of that comes from that environment, that upbringing, that
understanding of yourself as a woman and what a woman's
role is and all of those things. There's way too
much to get into, but I can see how all
(31:51):
of that unfolds and how it happens. My point is
that the villain can't stop being the villain. If you
paint someone as the villain in your story, they are
going to be the villain in the reader's eyes forever.
And so I can't just all of a sudden decide
I love her and I want the two of them
to be together unless the main character in the story
is the marriage, which is I think how he painted this.
The main character is the marriage. The marriage is what
(32:12):
you're rooting for. And I think the people who really
loved this book saw it through that mindset that it
wasn't Harrison who is the main character of the story.
It was the marriage that was the main character of
the story, and the marriage is what you're rooting for.
And then when the marriage survives by the end, everyone's
cheering and so happy, and that's the transformation. This marriage
went from being a bad marriage to a better marriage,
(32:35):
and so everyone's excited, but it didn't feel that way
to me. I didn't think that the transformation of the
hero was communicated clearly enough. I didn't see a guide
in the story until those very last pages. So it
didn't feel believable to me that there would be any
kind of transformation. And then I didn't like it. Wasn't
(32:55):
endeared to the character of his wife, because he paints
her as a villan through the entire story, and so
I couldn't just immediately flip and decide that I loved
her and I wanted this to work out, and I
wanted them to stay together. I think he made a
mistake by communicating about her in the way that he did.
We needed more narrator voice throughout the story, because what
(33:17):
I'm not saying is don't hear what I'm not saying.
What I'm not saying is that you can't be honest
about how you felt in a certain moment. What I
am saying is that we needed more narrator voice. If
he was going to speak so negatively of his wife,
he needed to say those things and then say that's
how I saw it then, but I see it differently now.
And here's why I see it so differently now, because
(33:39):
this and this happened, and the story really needs to
be about what took place that helped him to see
his wife differently. One of the things that I'll say
to wrap up is that I get a lot of
pushback from people when I tell them that in order
to write your personal story, you have to position yourself
as the hero of the story. And one of the
reasons I think that we have this internal or intuitive
(34:01):
recoil at the idea of being the hero of the
story is because we recognize that deep down we all
are flawed. We all have, you know, made mistakes, we
all have hurt people. All we don't see ourselves as
particularly heroic. And so what I have to explain to
people is that the hero in a literary sense is
a deeply flawed character who transforms. They don't become perfect,
(34:23):
but they open and expand their vantage point to see
themselves in a different light. So they're able to see
themselves with more compassion able to see themselves with more grace.
They're able to see their flaws in a way that
they weren't able to see them before. They're able to
soften around the edges of where they used to feel
so self righteous and right and you know, yeah, like
(34:46):
they used to feel so self important, and now they're
able to see other people. They're able to see a
broader scope. They're able to see a bigger picture. They're
able to see from a thirty thousand foot view. That's
the transformation that the hero has inside of the story.
And one of my complaints about the way the transformation
was communicated is it felt like the hero in this
(35:09):
story actually did this really heroic thing by waiting for
his wife to have her revelation, like she's going out
and cheating on him. She leaves with this other man
who's a friend of theirs. She leaves twice with him.
And I'm supposed to think of Harrison as heroic because
(35:29):
he holds firm, stays steady, doesn't fal for divorce, you know,
waits for her to come back, has all this grace
and compassion for her. And then in the end, when
she finally decides she does want to come back, he
goes and rescues her. He doesn't really let her come back.
He goes and rescues her from this other person, I guess,
and brings her back home, and then all of the
(35:50):
transformation happens in the last chapter of the book. So
in the end of the story, he ends up looking heroic,
but in a way I think that I wouldn't call heroic.
I think what would have been more heroic is if
his perspective of his wife would have changed so drastically
by the end of the story. And part of that
could have happened by having a guide come in and
(36:13):
helping him shift the way that he sees her, talk
about her differently, think about her differently, and maybe, yeah,
maybe patiently wait for her to come back. If that's
what he felt so compelled to do. It sounds like
he did feel compelled to do that. It sounds like
he really trusted his instinct and trusted his gut and
knew that he really wanted his wife and loved her.
But instead I felt like a lot of ego come through,
(36:35):
a lot of like he was the rescuer, he was
the Yeah, he was the hero at the end of
the story. And I don't mean that in a good way.
I don't think I didn't personally feel like by the end,
I was like, yeah, he's really an amazing man that
she should stay married to. I'm not saying that about
him as a person. He probably is an amazing man
that she should stay married to. I think the way
(36:57):
the story was communicated didn't accurately refined that to me
as the reader, and so in that way, I felt
like it was lacking. I can see why so many
people loved this book. If you're cheering on the marriage,
and if you're on the train of the most important
thing is that the marriage stays together, and if you're
in a position where your own marriage is in crisis,
(37:18):
I can see why this book would bring you an
incredible amount of hope. And Yeah, to hear this husband
talk about his wife so negatively and then have them
stay together, yeah, it makes you think like, if your
marriage is in crisis, you're like, oh, maybe my marriage
can be saved too. But I guess I'm also coming
from a philosophical vantage point where I don't believe that
(37:39):
the marriage is the most important thing to be saved.
I think sometimes marriages need to end and need to die.
I'm not saying theirs did. I don't know the intimate
details of their marriage. I think sometimes marriages need to
die in order for health to come through, in order
for life and vitality to flow through. And so I'm
not always going to say, you know, the marriage is
(38:00):
the number one most important thing. And yeah, I went
through a similar marriage crisis, and also my marriage ended,
and I think it needed to end in order for
health to come back to me. And the only reason
I bring that up is to say that there's a
separation here, and I'll let you kind of decipher for yourself,
a separation between a philosophical difference in terms of how
I see the world differently from Harrison Scott Key and
(38:24):
also the structural dynamics that are missing in the narrative.
And I'm not sure that I can, with no bias
at all, completely pull those two things apart. But hopefully
something I shared today about narrative structure and how stories
operate will help you as you take your own personal
story and put it down on the page. There has
to be a transformation of the hero, So ask yourself,
(38:46):
what is the transformation? Like, I went through this horrible,
hard thing. There's a reason I want to write about it.
It's kind of stuck in my body. It's making me
feel sick, I've got to get it on the page.
What did I learn? Like? What is so? How did
I change from the start of this story to the end.
And who was my guide who helped me to see
the world in a different way? What kind of things
(39:08):
did they say to me or how did they support
me or how did they help to shift and change
my vantage point? And then who is the villain in
my story? Is there a villain in my story? And
if I paint someone as the villain of my story,
I can't decide later that they're not the villain. They're
either the villain or they're not the villain. The villain
doesn't change. So if someone feels like the villain at
(39:28):
the beginning of the story, I need to let the
reader know that this person is actually not the villain,
but that I was the one who was using them
as an excuse to feel like a victim. So, if
you're working on writing your own story, I hope this
is helpful to you. I hope there's a little nugget
or two or maybe three that you can pull from
this and use it as you are shaping the narrative
(39:49):
structure of your own story. If you need more, go
buy a copy of Write your Story. I'll put a
link in the show notes. It is a step by
step guide for anybody who's looking to write their story.
Take a story from their life, take an experience from
their life, put it down on the page for your
own healing, for your own transformation, for your own clarity
and understanding, for your own therapeutic reasons. And also to
(40:10):
share with other people, and to hopefully share the hope
of the message, the hope of the transformation, the lightness,
the beauty that's in all of our stories. I hope
that you'll take the time to do that, and if
Write your Story can be a help to you, I
hope you'll grab a copy. Link is in the show notes.
I'll see you back next week on the Write Your
Story Podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold it's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I'm going to do
something that I've done a couple of times before, but
i haven't done in a while, which is to review
a book that I read recently. Not from the standpoint
(00:44):
of you should go buy this book or you shouldn't
go buy this book, but really from the standpoint of,
how are the elements of storytelling present in this book?
How are they working or maybe not quite working? Hoping
that this conversation will help you. If you are someone
who has a personal story that you would love to tell,
maybe you have an idea for a memoir. You want
(01:06):
to put your story, something you've lived through into words.
You're trying to create the structure. You're trying to get
some momentum on it. You're trying to get started writing,
and you're having a hard time really understanding how to
put the thing together. I think reading this book and
talking about it through the lens of what's working and
what's not working is going to help anybody who has
(01:26):
ever considered taking a story from their life and turning
it into a piece of writing. So that's really who
this episode is. Four. I'm not coming at this author,
and I say this, I give this caveat because this
is a book that came out a couple of years ago.
It came out in twenty twenty three. It has been,
for the most part, as far as I can tell,
a very beloved book. People talk about this book like
(01:47):
it's the best book that they've ever read. I'm sure
this book has really helped people. And there are a
handful of reasons for that, and I'll go through what
those reasons are, like what's really working about the way
that this author approaches the story. And then there are
also a handful of things that I think could have
been done better, and if those elements were present in
the narrative, that the narrative would have been even more helpful,
(02:09):
even more gripping, even more honest, and even more transformative.
For the reader. And I'll get into all of this
in just a minute. But the book was recommended to me,
probably over a year ago by a friend of mine,
and I added it to my Audible and then I
just never really got around to reading it, in part
because the subject matter doesn't really apply to me all
that much. I'll say more about that in just a
(02:30):
second here. But the book was recommended to me because
it's just such an incredible story, and it reminded this
person of the book that I wrote called Indestructible, which
feels like a lifetime ago that I wrote that book.
I do see the connection this person was making. There
are parallels and elements of it that are are somewhat similar.
I want to unpack that. But the subject matter isn't
(02:51):
all that applicable to me, and so I think I
put off reading it for a while, and then it
just popped up in my recommended I'd saved it on
my wish list, I find started listening to it via Audible,
and to be honest, I almost gave up on this
book after about I don't know, like twenty minutes of
listening to it. Sometimes the first couple of pages of
a book if it doesn't satisfy the requirements for what
(03:13):
I know needs to happen in the first part of
a book, I will abandon reading it, and yet with
a memoir, almost always i'll read from start to finish.
Even if I don't love the book, I will like
force myself to kind of plow through it, mostly because
my brain is always thinking, what is it that isn't working?
And I'm using this as like a bit of a
(03:33):
school room for myself to think about how I want
to put together my next book. So I'm using it
as a learning opportunity. Even if the book isn't my favorite,
if I'm not like really gripped by it, if I
can already see that it's missing some elements, I will
usually with a memoir hold on until the very end
so that I can understand, like, what was the missing
(03:54):
element here? And that's exactly what I did with this book.
The book is called How to Stay Married. It's written
by Harrison Scott Key. It came out in twenty twenty three,
and like I said, when the book came out, and
since the book has come out, as far as I
can tell, the book has been very, very very well received.
It is a book about a man who discovers that
his wife is having an affair, and the entire book
(04:14):
is him trying to unravel what's happening in the affair
and trying to, as the title suggests, stay married to
his wife. And as the title suggests, he does stay
married to his wife. This is one of the things
that I think really works about the book is that
he sets that arc for you from the very beginning.
You know, because of the title of the book, that
this man is going to stay married, and throughout the
(04:34):
book you're wondering how on earth could he possibly stay
married because of the mess that he and his wife
are in. In my opinion, because of how he talks
about his wife. I don't love the way he talks
about her. It is pretty condescending and demeaning, And so
the whole time I'm reading, I'm going like, how on
earth are these two people going to stay married? And
(04:55):
so that from that standpoint, it's a great hook. It
really does draw you into the story. You're asking yourself,
how are these two people going to stay married? And
what's motivating you to turn the page from one page
to the next is really answering that question, like what
is going to have to happen in order for these
two people to find their way to even liking each other.
(05:17):
I mean, it just feels like so impossible at the
beginning of the book, and I think this is one
of a few reasons why the book has been so
well received, because for people who are looking for some
sort of hope or solace inside of a marriage crisis,
I think the minute that they open to the first page,
they're finding exactly what they're looking for. They're finding someone
(05:39):
else who has been through what they've been through. They're
finding someone else who feels the way that they feel,
and they're finding Harrison scott Key, who really is a
great writer. I mean, he has an amazing ability to
turn a phrase. And that's not true of every single writer.
Not every single writer has a way with words, like
choosing the exact right word and the exact right moment
to really bring the point home. Not every single writer
(06:02):
has that gift. And yet I think in the case
of this book, my argument would be that Harrison Scott
Key leans so much on that ability to turn a
phrase that the structure of the story gets a little
bit lost, in my opinion, and I'm going to unpack that.
So I'm going to defend my position here because I
think I might be in the minority of people in
(06:23):
terms of how they feel about this book. Going back
to one other point that I brought up a second ago,
the parallels between Indestructible and How to Stay Married, I
do see the parallels there. In the case of Indestructible,
the story turns out very differently. I don't stay married,
But in terms of how the story begins a marriage
in crisis, I can totally understand why this person was like, Oh,
I bet you would really love this book, and you know,
(06:45):
I'm not in a place in my life where my
marriage is in crisis. In fact, what I shared on
last week's episode is that of all the areas of
my life, my marriage is probably the easiest for me.
And I don't say that with any kind of arrogance
or pride. There are other parts of my life that
are definitely struggling where I'm not thriving, as I talked
about last week. But for me, my marriage is a
(07:06):
place in my life where a I've gotten kind of lucky,
Like my husband and I found each other and we
just are extremely compatible. My husband is well He's a
nine on the enneagram if you know the Enneagram. He's
a very agreeable person. I have to almost like work
to draw out of him his stronger opinions. He does
have a bit of an eight wing, so he does
(07:26):
have strong opinions, but he has what I call a
long fuse, meaning like usually you won't hear from Matt
about his strong opinions. He just will kind of go along,
go with the flow, you know. He gives me like
lots of leverage, lots of space to just be myself
and do my thing and have you know, my opinions.
And then after a long fuse, he sometimes will have
(07:47):
a moment where he's like, no, I really care about this.
I'm putting my foot down. And he does have a
bit of a stubborn streak to him. But the way
that we move and breathe together just really works. We're
extremely combatible, we live well together, get along really well.
We like a lot of the same things. We entered
into our relationship later in life. Like we were not
young when we entered into relationship. I think I was
(08:09):
like thirty six when I met him, and he was
maybe thirty nine. We met in twenty seventeen, So I
don't know, I have to go back and do the math,
but I think it was thirty six and thirty nine
or maybe that was our Those were our ages when
we got married. So anyway, we met a little later
in life, just meaning that we had made a lot
of mistakes, we'd already lived a lot of life, we'd
already you know, just like had a lot of experiences
(08:29):
in the world and grown into the people that we
are today who just happened to be extremely compatible. So
that it's partly just luck. It's partly I will give
us some credit that both of us had done a
lot of emotional and psychological work before we met each other.
We had really worked to figure out who we are
and what was important to us and what mattered to us,
(08:51):
and how to set boundaries and how to stand up
for ourselves and how to communicate clearly and you know,
how to clean up what was on our side of
the street, and how to apologize and how to fight fairly,
and so many different things that by the time we
came together and we're practicing those things together, you know,
we just kind of meshed well together. And also another
thing is we had a lot of support. We have
(09:13):
a lot of privilege in our lives. We've both done
really well financially in our adult lives. We immediately when
we were starting to talk about maybe getting engaged and
moving in together, we hired a therapist and started meeting
with a therapist together. Not because anything was going wrong
in the relationship, but just because we wanted to build
a really sturdy foundation for where we were headed. So
we started meeting with a therapist weekly. We had that
(09:35):
moving into the season of living together, moving into the
season of marriage, we were very well supported. We have
tons of friends who have healthy relationships around us. We've
gotten lots of really great models, So we just have
in that area of our life a lot going for us.
In a way where the topic of a marriage crisis
doesn't really resonate with me on a deep level, but
(09:56):
it does because I have been through a marriage crisis before,
if that makes any sense, Like, yes, I totally get this,
I've lived through this before. My story turned out differently,
but also not all that differently, because even though in
the case of this memoir, these two people were able
to reconcile with one another, I feel like I did
very similar work wasn't able to reconcile with my ex husband,
(10:18):
but was able to reconcile in this way with Matt.
Where now we have this like really sturdy, supportive, strong
relationship that I mean, I hope Harrison's got key and
his wife have I don't know that I feel confident
in what their relationship is like now based on how
the story wrapped up, which is one of the things
that I'll talk about. But let me start from the
(10:39):
beginning in terms of a review of this book. And again,
this review is not from the standpoint of like is
this a good book or is this not a good book?
This review is purely from the standpoint of what I
teach and write your story, the elements of story that
really make a story work, what you ought to be
thinking about as you put your personal story together into
a piece of writing. And I just want to use
(10:59):
this story as an example of what works and what
doesn't work. The number one thing that I'm looking for
when I open up a memoir or when I listen
to the first couple of paragraphs of a memoir is
a sign immediately of a character transformation. And if you
don't know what I'm talking about, you can pick up
a copy of my book, write your story. You could
go back to the first season of this podcast and
(11:21):
listen to the first I think twelve or fourteen episodes
where I unpack each element that is important in a story.
One of those elements, and maybe I would put this
at the very very tippity top. The most important element
of any story is a heroic transformation. So you have
a character of a story who needs to change from
(11:43):
the beginning of a story to the end of the story.
Otherwise there is no story. It's not interesting, nobody cares,
nobody wants to engage. And also, like a personal story,
loses the essence of inspiration. If there is no personal transformation,
you can tell the wildest story in the whole wide world.
And if there's no personal transformation, it's really not that
(12:06):
interesting of a story. We're listening to a story, we're
reading a story, We're tuning into a story to know
how does this person change they go through this horrific
set of circumstances. But if they're the same person at
the end of the journey as they were at the
beginning of the journey, then what's even the point. What's
the point of the story. The point of the story
(12:27):
is the heroic transformation. So you might be saying, well,
you don't really get to know the heroic transformation until
the very end. And yet a really great author, someone
who knows how stories work, is going to set the
arc for you by telling you at the beginning of
a story how the hero changes, by alerting you, giving
you little breadcrumbs showing you that this transformation is present,
(12:53):
it's taking place, it hasn't happened yet, but it's going
to happen. And so it is the light at the
end of the horizon that pulls you and draws you
through the story. In the case of How to Stay Married,
I would say that the breadcrumb that pulls you through
the book is the idea that this couple stays married,
and so that's the transformation. I think that the author
(13:15):
has identified and that they're drawing you towards, like, we're
going to stay married, and so stay along for the
ride to see how we stay married. In my opinion,
that does not satisfy the need of a story for
a heroic transformation. Now that hero in this case does
(13:42):
transform in certain ways, and one of the ways that
he transforms is by becoming a bit of a better husband,
like on a practical level. From the beginning of the
story to the end of the story, he becomes more
involved in the home. He becomes a better dad, he
becomes more involved with his kids. He talks about pack lunch.
You know. At the beginning of the story, his wife
is depressed. She's kind of like overwhelmed, she's burnt out,
(14:08):
she's maxed out. She's doing all this stuff at home.
He's really out in the world building his career, building
this amount of success for himself and for his family,
although it really feels like more for himself than for
his family. And by the end of the story, he's
much more involved at home. He's, like I said, packing lunches,
He's doing dishes, he talks about he's there for bedtimes,
(14:30):
he's showing up for things for his kids. He's more
just practically involved in the home. So I do think
that transformation is clear and takes place, But even that
transformation doesn't become present in the story until about three
quarters of the way through the book, which again, in
my opinion, doesn't fully satisfy what is needed in order
(14:52):
to grip a reader's attention from the very beginning of
the story when I'm looking for when I first open
a book, when I read the first couple of paragraphs,
is something that alerts me that this person is not
the same at the end of the story as they
are at the beginning of the story. So the main
way to alert the reader to a character transformation is
(15:13):
through what I call narrator voice. And narrator voice is
the voice of the wise transformed hero, sort of calling
to us from the present, telling us about what's happening
happening now. So it's this sense that like back then,
I didn't know what I know now. If I had known,
(15:34):
I would have done things differently, But here's what I
did because I didn't know any better. That sense that
there's two different versions of the narrator. There's or not
even really the narrator. The narrator is the wise transformed voice.
The hero is the present day version of the character
(15:55):
of the story who's making the choices that they're making
in the present moment. And about heroes of stories, one
thing that we know to be true about heroes of
stories is that they're incredibly likable characters because they're broken
and flawed, just like us and so at the beginning
of the story, we need to both know that this
hero is deeply flawed. We need to know that they
(16:15):
are broken. We need to know that they don't know
all the answers. We need to almost be screaming at
them on the screen, like how could you do that?
How could you not know? How could you think that?
And then we also need to have this sense that
by the end of the story, those flaws have changed,
have softened, are different somehow, or are at least seen
(16:36):
in a new light and with a different perspective. They
don't have to be fixed, we don't need to be
perfected by the end of the story, but there needs
to be a sense that there's an awareness, a self
awareness that's a great word, a self awareness of those
flaws that makes us see them in a different light.
And one of the things that I wanted to mention
from How to Stay Married is there's an entire chapter
(16:57):
where Harrison Scott Key goes through a list of his flaws.
I'm the vantage point of his wife, and I think
this is a step in the right direction of endearing
us to the hero of the story by inviting us
into the flawed parts of his character. But the part
of it that didn't work for me is it didn't
feel like his perspective on those flaws was really articulated.
(17:20):
I don't know if he does have perspective on those
flaws as a person, but in the text, it didn't
feel like the perspective on those flaws was really well articulated.
I didn't personally feel like his perspective on why would
it be so for just as one example, why would
it be so heartbreaking and painful for his wife to
(17:41):
be the only one doing dishes for years upon years
upon years upon years. How might that feel for his
wife to be in that place. I didn't feel like
that was really unpacked or explored. And you know, later
in the book, I'm jumping around a little bit later
in the book, in the last couple of chapters of
(18:02):
the book, after the affair happens a second time and
after they're able to reconcile, I'm giving the book away,
but you kind of saw this coming anyway. There's like
a chapter or maybe two chapters at the very end
of the book where he does, it seems like, start
to explore some of this, But from the standpoint of
(18:22):
storytelling structure, that exploration really needed to begin in the
very very beginning of the book. It needed to be
introduced much much earlier, in my opinion, not without giving
too much away, but really letting the reader know, like
a different, more mature, more wise version of this man
is present at the end of the book, and that's
what's drawing us through the story. We're walking in that direction,
(18:45):
at least for me, And maybe part of this is
being colored by the vantage point of the wife and
really understanding what it is like to be saddled with
more of the domestic duties than husbands tend to be
charged with, and the feeling of what it's like to
be left at home alone with child rearing responsibilities and
(19:09):
domestic labor while husband goes out to breadwinn, and earn
and make a name for himself, and especially with his
career as a writer. He not only is you know,
just going out, it's not like he's going out and
building houses every day. Like he's going out and earning
a paycheck, yes, but also also making a name for
himself and doing a ted talk and traveling all over
(19:30):
the place and you know, earning the attention and the
accolades of the world and that feeling of being left
behind at home to do the less glamorous activity of
child rearing. I'm not saying it's not I'm not saying
it's any less important. It's definitely not, but the less
glamorous duties of laundry and dishes and cleaning, and you know,
(19:54):
constant meal prep and constant just like breaking up fights
and sibling squabbles and all of that stuff. I didn't
really feel by the end of the book like he
deeply understood why that would be so painful for his
wife and why she might have made these choices that
she did in light of how he was showing up
(20:14):
as a spouse. He did admit to some flaws. I'm
not saying he didn't admit to any flaws, but it
seemed like his assessment of why his wife had the
affair was more about her trauma, her upbringing, her sin,
her misunderstanding. And the other piece worth mentioning is that
this is written from a Christian vantage point, so that
also probably colors their view of the situation and also
(20:39):
maybe my response to the situation. So I'm admitting that
there might be some bias here, but in my opinion,
it didn't really feel like the transformation of the main
character was very well fleshed out. It felt more like
the character the main character in the story was the
marriage and it was about saving the marriage went from
being a bad marriage to a good marriage. But did
(21:01):
he go from being a bad husband to a good husband,
or from being an unseelf aware person to a self
aware person. I wasn't really all that convinced that he
had had that transformation. I'm not saying he didn't. He
may have, but I wasn't very convinced as the reader
that he was different at the end of the story
from what he was at the beginning of the story.
So to me, this was the first problem with the
(21:24):
narrative structure was that there was no clear transformation of
the hero in every story. If you're taking a story
from your life and you're putting it on to the
paper and you're wanting to share this story with other people,
the story has to have a hero. It has to
have a main character. That main character has to be flawed,
and that character, that hero has to go through a
(21:45):
clear transformation from the beginning of the story to the end.
And let me add one more thing to that list.
That transformation has to be communicated immediately at the beginning
of the story so that the reader knows, oh, what
transformation is happening. And I'm walking toward the light at
the end of the tunnel. That is the transformation, That
is the thing that is drawing me through the book,
and it is the Yeah, it's the light at the
(22:07):
end of the tunnel that I'm walking toward. If that
isn't present, then it really doesn't endear us to the
main character. We don't really want to follow their story,
and we feel like kind of opting out, taking the
nearest exit off of this particular freeway, which I did
feel like several times during this book. The only reason
I finished the book a couple reasons. I finished the book.
(22:28):
Number one, because it was recommended to me and because
of the parallels to my own story of divorce. Number two,
because of this episode, because I wanted to stay engaged
so that I could unpack this for you and for
myself as I think about writing a next book. And really,
those are the reasons that I stayed engaged. Otherwise, I
think from the very first ten pages of the book,
(22:50):
I probably would have checked out. I didn't get the
sense that this person was going to change, and because
of that, it didn't feel like that interesting of a
story to me. The transformation of the marriage didn't compel
me the same way that the transformation of the husband
might have or the transformation of the wife. I'm not
putting the onus of responsibility on him over her. I mean,
(23:11):
she did make the decision to have the affair and
to cheat and to step outside of the marriage, but
it's not her story. If it were her story, she'd
be telling from her vantage point and she would get
to share her own lens that she sees this through.
But it wasn't her story. It was his story, and
so a story told from my vantage point can't be
(23:33):
I'm a victim. You know, my wife had trauma and
she made this decision and it ruined my marriage. But
you know, thanks to God, like we pulled it off
in the end. That can't That's not a story. A
story is I went through this difficult thing. It changed me.
I'm different now than I was before. And here are
all the ways that I've changed. Here's how this has
(23:54):
changed my perspective of literally everything that I look at.
That's a story. The second thing that I I think
was missing from this narrative structure this particular book was
a guide. And to be clear, Harrison scott Key has
several friends who step into the narrative and who are
(24:14):
supportive to him, but none of them, in my opinion,
meet the conditions of the guide. The guide. The role
of the guide in the story is the guide comes
in to help the hero win the day because the
hero cannot achieve what they're trying to achieve without the
help of the guide. If they could, they would have
done it already. If the hero could achieve what they
(24:35):
wanted to achieve, they would have done it already. So
we intuitively know that the hero cannot do that without
someone to help them shift their perspective. And the guide,
in my opinion, doesn't enter the story until the last
two chapters of the book. And so even though he
has these friends, he has a pastor, he has a
(24:56):
handful of friends who are extremely supportive to him, he
doesn't have someone who comes into the story to shift
his perspective, to help him see himself differently, to see
his wife differently, to see the situation differently. He has
a handful of like what I would call villains and
I'll get to the villain concept more here in a minute,
because I really want to unpack that. But he has
a handful of people who shift his paradigm by showing
(25:18):
him how he doesn't want to be. Like, he has
a pastor at a big church that they're going to
who offers to put his wife through what is it called,
like their church process of rebuke, basically like bring her
in front of the elder board and excommunicate her from
the church. And he's like, no, no, no, I want
to That's not how I want to approach this situation.
(25:39):
I want to approach it with much more grace. So
that's a viewpoint that he has, a standpoint that he has,
but it's not a transformation, and that person, although it
helps him clarify the pastor helps him clarify how he
sees the situation, it doesn't qualify as a guide. Now.
A guide needs to come into the story and say, like,
you've been trying to do it this way, but I'm
(26:00):
telling you that's never going to work. This is what
you're going to have to try instead. And there is
no guide in the story until the very last two chapters,
when again after the second kind of fallout with his wife,
they go back to therapy, and then the therapist does
begin to act as a guide. And in my opinion,
those last I think it's a chapter or two chapters.
I can't remember because I listened on audible, but those
(26:23):
last couple of chapters of the book are almost the
narrative arc that I. If I were writing the book,
I would have followed the arc of those last two chapters.
I would have entered the story at that first day
in the therapist's office with his wife, and that would
have been the alla's last moment. I would have come
back to that moment again at the end of the story,
and I would have built the narrative arc around that moment,
(26:46):
because the therapist is the guide. The therapist is the
one who shifts their perspective. In my opinion, they would
not even still be married if it weren't for that therapist.
And yes, all of those other things matter and you
can touch on them, but this to me wasn't believable
because there was no guide guiding the here. And it
makes sense like there's no real transformations, there's no real guide,
(27:09):
there's no real guide to offer him the transformation. So
there's no real transformation of the main character. There's no
real guide. And the third thing I want to talk
about is the villain and the story, because it's not
something that I wrote about in much depth in Write
(27:32):
your Story, because a story does not require a villain.
Many stories have villains. Villains are present in many of
our personal stories, and I've recorded an episode before on
what to do with the villain in your story, But
a villain is not a required element of a story.
A story can operate with or without a villain. A
story can operate with a crisis and doesn't need a villain.
(27:54):
But oftentimes we feel that these are there are these
villains in our stories, and oftentimes there are villains in
our stories. One of the things that I think didn't
work about this particular narrative is that the author speaks
about his wife as if she is the villain of
the story, and he speaks about her so negatively. In
(28:14):
my opinion, again and this is coming through my lens,
the way he talks about her is so off putting
to me that I wondered for most of the story
why on earth she would ever stay married to him.
I just did not love the way that he talked
about her, and then it makes it really challenging for
the reader to flip their perspective about this supposed villain
(28:36):
of the story by the end of the story, because
you have built her up to be so villainous and
so evil and so hateful, and having done all these
awful things, how am I supposed to just immediately flip
my perspective about her in a matter of chapters. And
so the takeaway from this is that the villain and
the story can't become not the villain. If you're going
(28:56):
to paint someone as the villain, they have to stay
the villain. Two people in this story have to stay
exactly the same no matter what, the villain and the guide.
The guide doesn't change and the villain doesn't change. The
hero is the only one who changes. And that's how
you know who the story is about. It's how you
know who the main character is in the story, because
the hero is the one who transforms. The villain doesn't transform.
The villain doesn't change. So if you're going to paint
(29:17):
your wife as the villain, she can't be your wife
by the end of the story because otherwise we're going
to be rooting against her. And there's a narrative technique
called save the Cat. This is not for me. This
is from a famous screenwriter named Blake Snyder who's no
longer with us, but who wrote a book called Save
the Cat. Actually, there are a series of books called
Save the Cat that have been One was written by him,
(29:37):
and then a bunch have been written by students of
his who have followed in his footsteps. The concept of
save the Cat is if you want someone to love
a character, if you want them to love a hero
on the screen, you have to have a moment where
that hero does something selfless and unexpected in order to
endear that character to the reader, to the viewer. So
(30:01):
if a hero goes to save a cat, and they
maybe put themselves in danger to save this, you know, precious,
vulnerable creature, then that act of selflessness is going to
endear the hero to us. We're going to end up
loving the hero more because of that act of courage.
So you can use this narrative technique to make your
(30:23):
reader really fall in love with you, or to make
your reader really fall in love with another character in
the book. And yet there's no moment in how to
stay married in my opinion where his wife saves the cat.
There's no moment where you go like, oh, thank god, Okay,
I love her again. There is a moment at the
end of the story where he flips the script and
allows her to write a chapter. But I didn't feel
(30:45):
like it did. It didn't do enough for me to
let me into her world and to help me understand
why she made the choices that she made. Although you know,
as a woman, I can sort of understand why she
made the choices that she made, especially hearing the way
he talked about her, the way he talked about the marriage,
the way he talked about his career, it just all
felt a little degrading to me. It all felt kind
(31:07):
of like he looked down on her. He didn't really
see her as an equal to himself. It was subtle,
but I felt that that was there, And so for
most of the story I was going like, yeah, I
can understand, not the cheating part. I actually feel like
the you know, if she had the maturity and the
responsibility and the courage, she could have said to her husband,
(31:28):
I don't want to do this anymore. I went out
of this marriage, and that would be the more courageous
way to exit the relationship. She didn't have that, And
you know, again, like without getting into the weeds, a
lot of that comes from that environment, that upbringing, that
understanding of yourself as a woman and what a woman's
role is and all of those things. There's way too
much to get into, but I can see how all
(31:51):
of that unfolds and how it happens. My point is
that the villain can't stop being the villain. If you
paint someone as the villain in your story, they are
going to be the villain in the reader's eyes forever.
And so I can't just all of a sudden decide
I love her and I want the two of them
to be together unless the main character in the story
is the marriage, which is I think how he painted this.
The main character is the marriage. The marriage is what
(32:12):
you're rooting for. And I think the people who really
loved this book saw it through that mindset that it
wasn't Harrison who is the main character of the story.
It was the marriage that was the main character of
the story, and the marriage is what you're rooting for.
And then when the marriage survives by the end, everyone's
cheering and so happy, and that's the transformation. This marriage
went from being a bad marriage to a better marriage,
(32:35):
and so everyone's excited, but it didn't feel that way
to me. I didn't think that the transformation of the
hero was communicated clearly enough. I didn't see a guide
in the story until those very last pages. So it
didn't feel believable to me that there would be any
kind of transformation. And then I didn't like it. Wasn't
(32:55):
endeared to the character of his wife, because he paints
her as a villan through the entire story, and so
I couldn't just immediately flip and decide that I loved
her and I wanted this to work out, and I
wanted them to stay together. I think he made a
mistake by communicating about her in the way that he did.
We needed more narrator voice throughout the story, because what
(33:17):
I'm not saying is don't hear what I'm not saying.
What I'm not saying is that you can't be honest
about how you felt in a certain moment. What I
am saying is that we needed more narrator voice. If
he was going to speak so negatively of his wife,
he needed to say those things and then say that's
how I saw it then, but I see it differently now.
And here's why I see it so differently now, because
(33:39):
this and this happened, and the story really needs to
be about what took place that helped him to see
his wife differently. One of the things that I'll say
to wrap up is that I get a lot of
pushback from people when I tell them that in order
to write your personal story, you have to position yourself
as the hero of the story. And one of the
reasons I think that we have this internal or intuitive
(34:01):
recoil at the idea of being the hero of the
story is because we recognize that deep down we all
are flawed. We all have, you know, made mistakes, we
all have hurt people. All we don't see ourselves as
particularly heroic. And so what I have to explain to
people is that the hero in a literary sense is
a deeply flawed character who transforms. They don't become perfect,
(34:23):
but they open and expand their vantage point to see
themselves in a different light. So they're able to see
themselves with more compassion able to see themselves with more grace.
They're able to see their flaws in a way that
they weren't able to see them before. They're able to
soften around the edges of where they used to feel
so self righteous and right and you know, yeah, like
(34:46):
they used to feel so self important, and now they're
able to see other people. They're able to see a
broader scope. They're able to see a bigger picture. They're
able to see from a thirty thousand foot view. That's
the transformation that the hero has inside of the story.
And one of my complaints about the way the transformation
was communicated is it felt like the hero in this
(35:09):
story actually did this really heroic thing by waiting for
his wife to have her revelation, like she's going out
and cheating on him. She leaves with this other man
who's a friend of theirs. She leaves twice with him.
And I'm supposed to think of Harrison as heroic because
(35:29):
he holds firm, stays steady, doesn't fal for divorce, you know,
waits for her to come back, has all this grace
and compassion for her. And then in the end, when
she finally decides she does want to come back, he
goes and rescues her. He doesn't really let her come back.
He goes and rescues her from this other person, I guess,
and brings her back home, and then all of the
(35:50):
transformation happens in the last chapter of the book. So
in the end of the story, he ends up looking heroic,
but in a way I think that I wouldn't call heroic.
I think what would have been more heroic is if
his perspective of his wife would have changed so drastically
by the end of the story. And part of that
could have happened by having a guide come in and
(36:13):
helping him shift the way that he sees her, talk
about her differently, think about her differently, and maybe, yeah,
maybe patiently wait for her to come back. If that's
what he felt so compelled to do. It sounds like
he did feel compelled to do that. It sounds like
he really trusted his instinct and trusted his gut and
knew that he really wanted his wife and loved her.
But instead I felt like a lot of ego come through,
(36:35):
a lot of like he was the rescuer, he was
the Yeah, he was the hero at the end of
the story. And I don't mean that in a good way.
I don't think I didn't personally feel like by the end,
I was like, yeah, he's really an amazing man that
she should stay married to. I'm not saying that about
him as a person. He probably is an amazing man
that she should stay married to. I think the way
(36:57):
the story was communicated didn't accurately refined that to me
as the reader, and so in that way, I felt
like it was lacking. I can see why so many
people loved this book. If you're cheering on the marriage,
and if you're on the train of the most important
thing is that the marriage stays together, and if you're
in a position where your own marriage is in crisis,
(37:18):
I can see why this book would bring you an
incredible amount of hope. And Yeah, to hear this husband
talk about his wife so negatively and then have them
stay together, yeah, it makes you think like, if your
marriage is in crisis, you're like, oh, maybe my marriage
can be saved too. But I guess I'm also coming
from a philosophical vantage point where I don't believe that
(37:39):
the marriage is the most important thing to be saved.
I think sometimes marriages need to end and need to die.
I'm not saying theirs did. I don't know the intimate
details of their marriage. I think sometimes marriages need to
die in order for health to come through, in order
for life and vitality to flow through. And so I'm
not always going to say, you know, the marriage is
(38:00):
the number one most important thing. And yeah, I went
through a similar marriage crisis, and also my marriage ended,
and I think it needed to end in order for
health to come back to me. And the only reason
I bring that up is to say that there's a
separation here, and I'll let you kind of decipher for yourself,
a separation between a philosophical difference in terms of how
I see the world differently from Harrison Scott Key and
(38:24):
also the structural dynamics that are missing in the narrative.
And I'm not sure that I can, with no bias
at all, completely pull those two things apart. But hopefully
something I shared today about narrative structure and how stories
operate will help you as you take your own personal
story and put it down on the page. There has
to be a transformation of the hero, So ask yourself,
(38:46):
what is the transformation? Like, I went through this horrible,
hard thing. There's a reason I want to write about it.
It's kind of stuck in my body. It's making me
feel sick, I've got to get it on the page.
What did I learn? Like? What is so? How did
I change from the start of this story to the end.
And who was my guide who helped me to see
the world in a different way? What kind of things
(39:08):
did they say to me or how did they support
me or how did they help to shift and change
my vantage point? And then who is the villain in
my story? Is there a villain in my story? And
if I paint someone as the villain of my story,
I can't decide later that they're not the villain. They're
either the villain or they're not the villain. The villain
doesn't change. So if someone feels like the villain at
(39:28):
the beginning of the story, I need to let the
reader know that this person is actually not the villain,
but that I was the one who was using them
as an excuse to feel like a victim. So, if
you're working on writing your own story, I hope this
is helpful to you. I hope there's a little nugget
or two or maybe three that you can pull from
this and use it as you are shaping the narrative
(39:49):
structure of your own story. If you need more, go
buy a copy of Write your Story. I'll put a
link in the show notes. It is a step by
step guide for anybody who's looking to write their story.
Take a story from their life, take an experience from
their life, put it down on the page for your
own healing, for your own transformation, for your own clarity
and understanding, for your own therapeutic reasons. And also to
(40:10):
share with other people, and to hopefully share the hope
of the message, the hope of the transformation, the lightness,
the beauty that's in all of our stories. I hope
that you'll take the time to do that, and if
Write your Story can be a help to you, I
hope you'll grab a copy. Link is in the show notes.
I'll see you back next week on the Write Your
Story Podcast
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