Chapter 5

Breaking Through the Shell

In the James Bond films the women are perfect, gorgeous, plastic dolls. James can have sex with them, but he can’t fall in love with them because they are not human. The only time their shells crack is when they get caught in the crossfire and killed. They even make perfect corpses. Sometimes spray-painted gold. It’s not that James Bond is incapable of loving someone. He loves M (when played by Judi Dench) and Miss Honeypenny and probably even Q, but no one could love these Bond babes. Not without cracks in them. By this point you know better than to write Bond girls, right? Good. I think in nearly thirty films James has only fallen in love once. If you know which movie that was, you watch too much Bond.

Second, do not have your people falling in love by using the Love Montage. A beautiful couple walks through an open-air market buying French bread, flowers, and wine. They walk on the beach at sunset. They picnic in a field of flowers or stand kissing in the rain. DO NOT DO THIS. Because it’s clichéd. But more importantly, because it’s not how people actually fall in love. It’s a shampoo commercial. These are generic lovers, not individual human beings who are specifically perfect for each other in all their quirky particularity.

Third, never have characters fall in love off-screen or between scenes. Love cannot be implied. It has to be written. You’ve seen movies where somewhere along the line, the two characters start acting like they’re in love, and you wonder, when did that happen? When did they fall in love? This usually means the writer didn’t have the chops. Or something important got left on the proverbial cutting-room floor. People fall in love with each other when there is a crack in the shell that keeps us separate, and we fall into each other’s hearts through this crack. It may sound romantic, but I’m going to talk about this technically because it is also a writing technique. Sometimes you have to have the right tool to get to the heart of the story.

The crack can be simply a vulnerability exposed by one person to the other. In Walk the Line (after the cute meet with the guitar strap), the crack occurs in June and Johnny’s second meeting, late at night in a coffee shop. Johnny shows June a picture of his wife and baby girl. June also has a baby girl at home about the same age. A tiny hairline crack begins to appear. He mentions how he and his brother Jack loved a particular song June used to sing and it comes out that Jack died. John’s grief is so raw, he has to stop and pull it together so he won’t break down right there. The crack grows.

Then June looks into his eyes and says, “John, you’re tired, aren’t you?” and suddenly all of his exhaustion and sadness opens up in front of her, a huge crack exposing his wounded heart. And June falls into that opening. She’s in love, right there. And we can’t help but feel the actor’s real-life loss of his own brother, River Phoenix, who was dear to all of us. We cry for them both.

Paul Simon wrote on his Graceland album, that losing love is like a window in the heart. That everyone can see that you’re blown apart. This is what we’re looking for. The window into the heart. The choice is yours. To wrench it open or break it.

In the chapters to come we’re going to look at many examples of the different kinds of cracks you can use to allow your characters access to each other’s inner selves. There are many kinds of openings between hearts.

The crack is always a vulnerability. It can be physical, an infirmity, a handicap, or a literal wound. It can be emotional. If someone is grieving, heartbroken, lost, depressed, or in shock, our natural empathy is engaged. Our hearts go out to him or her. In a state of grief, a person is walking around wide open, with broken heart exposed.

Low self-esteem, embarrassment, and humiliation are all forms of cracks that can be used to create an opening for love.

If someone has his or her guard down in a completely open, honest interaction, that in itself can be a crack in the armor that keeps us separate. Laughter is an open state of being.

Surprisingly, drugs and alcohol can also create an opening. Substances lower inhibitions and a person’s true self can be exposed: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the silly.

Nakedness, whether literal or figurative, is a vulnerability.

Sometimes it can be the simplest tiny detail that humanizes someone. A moment of childishness. Or humanness. A man stops to pick up a bird’s nest and holds it in his hand, carefully touching the one tiny unbroken egg with his huge, rough fingertip. A woman could fall for a man in that moment. Even if he were otherwise gruff and sullen.

You can begin to see how this dynamic works. Let’s explore examples of these choices. Start to think about the kind of crack that would work to help your characters fall in love.

Take out your hammers and chisels. Let’s crack open a few hearts.