mitchteemley.com - Mitch Teemley - The Power of Story

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There may be writers who want to alienate their readers. (I can’t think of any, off-hand, perhaps because they’ve been so successful in achieving their goal.) But the rest of us want to draw our readers in. We want them to identify with the themes and heroes we create. In other words, we strive for universality. But oddly enough, our means of accomplishing this may be the very thing that defeats our purpose.

Early in my writing career, I wrote a film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, a novel set in late 19 th and early 20 th century China. I was concerned that western audiences would be unable to relate to an obscure Asian farmer’s rise from crushing poverty to profligate wealth. Consequently, I downplayed the more “foreign” elements of the story. Result? The first draft fell as flat as an undercooked mooncake.

So I rewrote it, folding back in details I’d previously omitted: enigmatic local gods, foil papers and lucky colors, opium dens and prostitution-serving “tea houses.” To my surprise, the first studio exec who read it remarked how “universal” the story was. That was when I first came to understand the principal of:

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