{"id":1657,"date":"2014-03-21T10:05:48","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T14:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/?p=1657"},"modified":"2014-03-21T10:05:48","modified_gmt":"2014-03-21T14:05:48","slug":"but-she-doesnt-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/but-she-doesnt-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"LET&#8217;S STEAL FROM THIS: &#8220;But She Doesn&#8217;t Know It&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1657\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbut-she-doesnt-know-it%2F&amp;text=LET%26%238217%3BS%20STEAL%20FROM%20THIS%3A%20%26%238220%3BBut%20She%20Doesn%26%238217%3Bt%20Know%20It%26%238221%3B&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbut-she-doesnt-know-it%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><div id=\"fb_share_1\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px;\"><a name=\"fb_share\" type=\"box_count\" share_url=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/but-she-doesnt-know-it\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php\">Share<\/a><\/div><div><script src=\"http:\/\/static.ak.fbcdn.net\/connect.php\/js\/FB.Share\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div><p>I&#8217;m baffled whenever someone doesn&#8217;t like <em>Mad Men<\/em>. I think it&#8217;s my favorite show of all time. Nothing else, for me, has ever created as full and exciting a world, and I frankly don&#8217;t understand when someone says it&#8217;s &#8220;cold.&#8221; <em>Mad Men<\/em> is funny, it&#8217;s heartbreaking, and there are <em>huge<\/em> emotions going on. Maybe, for some people, the problem is the business setting or the distancing effect of its period clothing or the fact that most of those emotions aren&#8217;t being shouted or bawled for the Emmy reel. But I love it, and I will be sad when there are no more new ones.<\/p>\n<p>So why are we here? Ah:<em> Mad Men<\/em> creator Matthew Weiner recently\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/po.st\/MIBsAQ\" target=\"_blank\">gave an interview<\/a> to HitFix wherein he said this:<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8230;the story of the show has always been about \u2014 I always joke in the writers room, when I&#8217;m pitching a story, the key phrase is, &#8220;But he doesn&#8217;t know it.&#8221; Like, &#8220;something happens, but she doesn&#8217;t know it.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m always on the lookout for useful ideas, so to have one boiled down to a <em>single phrase<\/em> is invaluable. In this case, the idea itself certainly isn&#8217;t new &#8212; surprise is a key element of storytelling, and if your characters know everything that&#8217;s going on in their world, it&#8217;ll be a dull story indeed. But there&#8217;s something about Weiner&#8217;s phrase &#8212; but he doesn&#8217;t know it &#8212; that feels like a key turning in a lock. It&#8217;s not unlike the Ernst Lubitsch maxim popularized by Billy Wilder: &#8220;Let the audience add up two plus two. They&#8217;ll love you forever.&#8221; You <em>know<\/em> these things by instinct &#8212; we&#8217;ve all heard stories our entire lives &#8212; but there&#8217;s something about the neat phrasing that helps externalize them, gives them life.<\/p>\n<p><em>But she doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em> is particularly great because it&#8217;s a magical phrase that activates\u00a0<em>surprise <\/em>as if surprise were\u00a0one of the sleeper assassins in<em> The Manchurian Candidate.<\/em>\u00a0I don&#8217;t know when surprise stopped being important to fiction writers, but I can tell you it never stopped being important to readers. I&#8217;ve been in a lot of workshops over the years, and I very much remember certain elements &#8212; surprise, coincidence &#8212; being dismissed as hokey or commercial. Yet, who do we still hold up as comprising the literary canon? Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, the Brontes. Guess what they used <em>all the time<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p><em>But she doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em> is merely the dangling of the other shoe. So much of drama comes down to a character&#8217;s expectations. In fact, 99% of the time when someone says &#8220;this comes from character,&#8221; that&#8217;s what they&#8217;re talking about: a character expects something, and it either cannot come true for them, OR it <em>can<\/em> come true but never in the way they originally expected. The shoe kind of has to drop in one of those two spots.<\/p>\n<p>Likewise, if someone&#8217;s ever told you, &#8220;Not enough of this comes from character,&#8221; they meant you made stuff happen without thinking of what your character(s) wanted.<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Mad Men<\/em>, Don Draper expects things to work out for himself because he&#8217;s so handsome and charming. He also expects, way deep down inside, for his truths to be discovered &#8212; that he has no formal education, that he was raised in a whorehouse, that his name isn&#8217;t even Don Draper.<\/p>\n<p>These two expectations work together to create a massive amount of tension in <em>Mad Men<\/em> &#8212; and to create 100% of Don Draper&#8217;s problems. He takes crazy risks and treats people poorly because he&#8217;s living in a country and an era that delights in guys like him. He also sabotages himself every step of the way because he knows he&#8217;s <em>not really that guy<\/em>, and he knows the world he&#8217;s charmed is always one phone call or clearheaded moment away from figuring it out. Meanwhile, for all this self-awareness, Don&#8217;s greatest survival tool is his capacity for denial. So when your entire existence is built on supports you&#8217;ve either booby-trapped yourself (then denied doing so) or whose erosion you&#8217;ve willfully ignored, you&#8217;re going to be &#8220;surprised,&#8221; and in the worst way, pretty constantly. For Don Draper, there&#8217;s always a <em>But he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em> lurking around the corner. Doubly so for Pete, who has all of Don&#8217;s puffery and denial, but none of his actual skills.<\/p>\n<p>A very basic illustration of <em>but she doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em> would be &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.auburn.edu\/~vestmon\/Gift_of_the_Magi.html\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Gift of the Magi<\/span><\/a>,&#8221; right? She&#8217;s selling her beautiful hair so she can afford a new fob for his old watch, <em>but she doesn&#8217;t know (it)<\/em> that he&#8217;s already sold his watch to buy silver combs for her beautiful hair.<\/p>\n<p>A caution: why that story wouldn&#8217;t fly now is precisely because <em>But<\/em> s<em>he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em> is\u00a0the whole story, irony its only currency. The characters don&#8217;t really shift or grow, except for learning, I guess, a crucial lesson about never doing anything nice for anyone. (I&#8217;m being mean, but this was a happy couple to begin with.) If you were to write &#8220;The Gift of the Magi&#8221; today, you&#8217;d have to make it more about the <em>why<\/em> of it all. You&#8217;d make it more about what was really going on inside either Della or Jim, and what they expected would happen as a result of their sacrifice. And something more palpable would shift between them, or for one of them. There&#8217;d be stakes, whereas in O. Henry&#8217;s version they start out in a good place with each other and they finish in a good place. Also, the writing is dreadful. It&#8217;s maybe the worst-written best-known story of all time.<\/p>\n<p>A final example of <em>but she doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em> can be the simple story I made up for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/4-steps-and-a-bonus-to-making-character-everything\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">this posting on character<\/span><\/a>. Jeff, who works at a grocery store and wants a fancy car, decides to take his co-worker&#8217;s offer to help use the stockroom for some shady business in exchange for more money than he could normally make in months.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This shady business is being conducted by people who are already on the brink of internal warfare &#8212; <em>but he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>While Jeff&#8217;s on the way to the store that night, something goes wrong with these shady-business guys &#8212; <em>but he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Jeff shows up, everyone&#8217;s dead, and there&#8217;s a bag full of drugs. The drugs most definitely still belong to someone, someone not in the store and thus very much alive&#8211; <em>but he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>The store security cams are still functioning &#8212; <em>but he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Taking that bag will change and endanger his life in a dozen different ways &#8212; <em>but he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The reason any of this story progresses, by the way, is because all Jeff can see are his <em>expectations<\/em> of a better life with better stuff. The\u00a0<em>but he doesn&#8217;t know it<\/em>\u00a0stuff would certainly work with a dim patsy of a character, but what makes it feel real and full of stakes and moments that make you cringe for the character&#8217;s well-being? That comes from the character&#8217;s involvement, from his or her complicity<em> because of<\/em>\u00a0those expectations.<\/p>\n<p><em>Next time: William Trevor&#8217;s story &#8220;On the Streets&#8221; and the case of the displaced epiphany.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1657\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbut-she-doesnt-know-it%2F&amp;text=LET%26%238217%3BS%20STEAL%20FROM%20THIS%3A%20%26%238220%3BBut%20She%20Doesn%26%238217%3Bt%20Know%20It%26%238221%3B&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbut-she-doesnt-know-it%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><p>MAD MEN&#8217;s Matthew Weiner uses this phrase when he&#8217;s breaking stories. Good lord, who better to steal from?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[83,81,84,82,102],"class_list":["post-1657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lets-steal-from-this","tag-character","tag-mad-men","tag-magi","tag-matthew-weiner","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1668,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions\/1668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}