March Experiment: Consider the Iguana (Patreon)

Consider the Iguana: A Scenework Masterclass

And a good day to you, Mad Fiction Lab! It is finally thinking about, though not committing to, being spring here in Maine. It still needs a little time to get used to the idea, to learn to be comfortable with it, to trust again. Which means it’s grey and thundering and soggy with last years leaves and the only gestures of affection the old wretch is willing to give us are a few snowdrops and crocuses and the hard, alien tips of the tulips we planted in October poking up through the sodden, still half-frozen soil. Seasons take so long in New England. It’s one of the reasons I moved here—that I clung to the idea of four of them, dammit, not two or one, to the snow and the clinging ice and the final burst of green that feels so fucking earned out here, never taken for granted, so longed for that even the moment before it happens it feels to your core like it never ever will. When the weather takes so long to sort out its feelings about identity, life seems to take longer. Years are added on when one year weighs like ten. 

All the same, I could do with some sunshine. 

I had something entirely different planned to write about for this month’s experiment. But then I couldn’t sleep last night, which is basically every night for me since this little stranger took up residence in my belly, and I decided, as one does, to watch Planet Earth 2, because I love animals, you guys, I love them so much and I just want to hold each and every one of them that is not an insect but they will not let me, they will never let me, which is one of the grand tragedies of my life, because I think we all know how good I would be at holding animals, and snow leopards just don’t know what they’re missing, how thoroughly snuggled they could be. I love them so much that people used to say I should be a veterinarian when I was little, and I just couldn’t understand why they would think that, because if I were a veterinarian, sooner or later, I knew would have to cut and animal. I could probably put it off for a long time, I reasoned, but eventually, eventually, they would expect me to do a surgery and even if it would ultimately help the beastie, I just couldn’t ever cut an animal, it was too awful to think about. 

Anyway. British nature documentaries narrated by the immortal (he better be) David Attenborough. 

There is a scene in the very first episode of Planet Earth 2 starring a baby iguana and some snakes. Okay, a lot of snakes. You may have watched this scene online or heard about it, and if not, I’m linking it here so that you can see what is quite possibly the most compelling 3 minutes ever committed to film. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

In the end, it’s a very, very simple story. Basic, even. Marine iguanas lay their eggs in the sand, where they hatch alone. Once they hatch, they have to run across this barren expanse toward the high rocks to get to safety, because apparently iguanas have their babies in Snake Alley. A truly terrible number of snakes take off after the slightest movement from one of these newborn lizards, attack, and eat them. After watching this happen a few times, we see a very clever-looking little fellow take off with an awkward, frantic baby-gait, evading the snakes by holding still to avoid their tyrannosaurus-vision, squirming out of a pile of them just when you think he’s been caught, and missing by millimeters a horde of jumping snakes as he finally makes it to join his brothers and sisters on a safe outcropping.

Seriously, it is an incredible sequence. It’s so tense, and horrifying, and you get so deadly invested so quickly in the fate of this little newly-hatched iguana running over the cooled lava-landscape of the Galapagos Islands toward freedom and life, and I love the movies, but I was more emotionally involved in this little lizard’s journey that I have been in any Marvel franchise flick I’ve ever seen and frankly, quite a few indie tearjerkers that are supposed to say something deep about the nature of humanity and futility and what have you. And I’m not alone. When I tweeted the words “Planet Earth 2” and “baby iguana” people knew exactly what I was talking about, and the shared experience of shouting at the screen for a reptile to get away and live his big reptile life with your heart in your throat and your hands over your eyes is, evidently, nearly universal.

So, despite having a wholly different essay planned, I started thinking about why this scene works. Why is it so compelling, so engaging, so instantly emotionally accessible, when, real talk, it’s just a iguana running away from a bunch of hungry snakes. There is no context, no one has a name, there is no backstory or complex motivations, no dialogue, no one is a fully-fleshed out character, there is nothing in this scene that would be called “good writing” in a fiction class. It’s just a chase. I’m generally bored by chase sequences in movies—car crash, running people, snarling into a cell phone, yawn. 

And yet. 

And yet, this little creature’s struggle is everything so many blockbuster books and movies are not. With a very few exceptions, even works I love didn’t get my heart rate up like this. Why? Why does this scene work on a narrative level? Why is it the scene in PE2, despite there being many other prey/predator sequences in the series? What’s working so well here that we can take into our fiction writing? How can we make ourselves a baby iguana of our own?

We’ll put aside what can’t be replicated in prose, namely, the stirring music that churns through the scene. It matters, of course, and it’s very effective, but few of us get to have our work scored by the London Philharmonic, so let’s not torture ourselves with imagining how awesome even our breakfast scenes would be with actual smashing drumline crescendos. 

The landscape helps. It’s alien, inhuman, monochrome. It’s a volcanic island full of simultaneously sharp and globby spires of black rock formed when liquid magma hit freezing ocean. The spires surround the birthing ground, which is sand, as Sir David says, but not the sand of vacation beaches or a child’s sandbox. Billions of multicolored pebbles, who knows how deep, pepper what is, undeniably, a stage. We are given minimal information, but it is enough: the eggs are laid in the sand, and hatch in June, but this is the country of snakes, and to survive the infants must escape. But the very alienness of the landscape allows us to focus—there is no hint of human presence, of anything at all but rock, iguana, snakes, this is the only story in the world at this moment, in this place, and because this place is so different from the places we call our own, we bring none of our assumptions or complex primate concerns into it. 

This is one of the pounding pistons at work in the heart of science fiction and fantasy. Realism has other parts, performing other functions, providing other thrusts. But this one is ours. When the landscape is alien, when it is so very different from what we see when we look out our actual window on any given actual day, it provides a certain focus, gives us a certain ability to identify with things very much not part of our own experience. We feel safe doing it here, because here is not home, what happens here doesn’t “matter” the same way. Which is at once why people look down on speculative fiction and why it can be so effective—when the reader starts out feeling safe, because it’s just a story in a wild place and nothing really at all to do with our day to day lives, it’s easier to slip under their skin, under all their defenses, their mechanisms for keeping themselves separate from a story. 

Look at an animal, see human drama more clearly than in any person. 

That inhuman landscape, however, also puts us on our backfoot—anything could happen here. There are no rules. What we are about to see isn’t concerned with our tender sensibilities. It could go badly, even when we don’t want it too. And we begin to worry. It’s a documentary, after all. No one is guiding us toward a happy ending. This is part of why I love to use the illusion of authority in my work—ephemera, articles, museum placards, encyclopedia entries, even entire documentary films, as in Radiance. It gives the impression of being real, and real doesn’t care how you want it to turn out. Like the honey badger, it don’t give a fuck. Real is risky, and ups the stakes for the reader.

Speaking of stakes, I think a huge part of what makes the scene effective is that, before the final run of the baby iguana, we see that run turn out really, really, graphically shittily for several other baby iguanas, who are just as cute and intrepid as the others. They get squeezed to death by six or seven snakes at once. They almost make it and get snatched off the rocks at the last second. We see one’s head getting crushed in the mouth of a snake. The birthing ground is littered with skulls and skeletons of iguanas that didn’t make it because jesus christ this is a nice nature show right? In fact, though he never turns around to see it, when the final baby iguana emerges into the world for the first time, right behind him is the stiff, half-eaten body of one of his brothers or sisters. It’s fucking grim, you guys. It’s also like a medieval painting in its universality—symbol of life and symbol of death. A new baby being born into a killing ground full of shattered bones. 

Even though this all takes place before the actual scene in question, it’s important, and it’s something that gets missed a lot in people’s first drafts. If you want the reader to feel tension and care about the outcome of your drama, you have to show them the stakes: what happens if your hero doesn’t succeed? We gotta see those bones. We gotta see an orgy of snakes feasting. We have to see a glimpse of the horrible outcome so we know that we definitely do not want it. It’s not half as terrifying to just watch an iguana run away and make it if we didn’t see, by my count, four others rather emphatically not make it, and the remains of a few dozen others. It means that when we see the last one start to run across the sand, we kind of sort of think this is probably more of the same, and he’s not going to make it either, which is what makes our heart rates increase when he keeps going and going and oh god maybe this time he’s not going to die. Most stories end up with the heroes pulling it out in the end, of course. But the trick is to make the reader think they’re looking at yet another skeleton for as long as possible before you show them that the iguana really is alive after all.

But all that is simply set-up. A kind of infodump before the action. The reason this scene is so gripping, such an emotional wringer, is that it plays to our innate sense of fairness. What we are seeing is not fair. There are dozens of snakes after one poor, helpless iguana who just got itself born and has to deal with this shit. The snakes move with smooth, purposeful, adult, practiced motion. They are in control. The iguana flails about with all the awkwardness of a newborn, its limbs frantically flying about as it tries to propel itself with zero grace of any kind because this is literally the first thing it has ever experienced. The baby iguana also, you know, has a face. And it’s a face designed by Pixar. There is something so clever and intrepid and a little flippant about the cant of his scaled browbone, as compares to the cold eye-and-head combo of the snakes. The snakes are less like us, nominally, than the iguana. We root for Team Like Us, because we are tribal things. There is nothing primate here, it is all reptile, yet still our human eye looks for something familiar, something to anthropomorphize. We’d anthropomorphize a plate if it was the only thing around. It’s easy to read emotions into that little face, that almost-smile, that determined expression. And so, yes, it’s not fair, and it’s happening to something like us. The snakes are going to hurt the baby and it has no defense. No parents around to help it. So we put ourselves in the place of a big iguana. We want to protect it, but we can’t. We’re helpless, like he is. We’re so involved. 

And this, this is how you make people care about a protagonist. You put them at the center of a situation that is unfair. That is going to hurt them. That makes them seem so very like us. The experience of hurting others on purpose isn’t nearly as universal as the experience of being hurt. We have all been hurt. We all instinctively want to not have been hurt, to go back and save ourselves, and if we can’t do that, and oh man, we so can’t, we want to save others. The easiest possible way to make a character likable is to hurt them as soon as possible. Get the snakes after them. Let them escape, but only barely. There isn’t one person who has scene this damn scene with the damn iguana who wouldn’t watch a full length feature film about his adventures. Who wouldn’t line up for that shit. Because we went through it with him, we feel like it happened to us, too, because at some point in all our lives, we’ve been the iguana, so afraid, so small compared to what’s coming for us, needing help so badly and knowing it won’t come, so surrounded, so much at a disadvantage, so penned in by the world being its old cruel hungry self, nothing personal, kid, that’s just how it goes, and fuck me, if the iguana makes it we can all make it, up to the rocks and the sea and freedom and…and other iguanas looking at us like “yeah, it’s not a big deal, we all did it, don’t be so proud of yourself.”

And of course, some of us have been the snakes.

But fewer, fewer.

This part of why a later scene, in which a fox hunts a bunch of baby ibexes, is tense, but not nearly as effecting. Because it seems more or less fair. One hungry fox trying to catch one baby ibex seems less brutal. One on one. Foxes have to eat, too, we can reason. Sure, the ibexes have eyes fashioned in a Disney lab and they’re so so cute, but there’s tons of them, and that fox looks like it’s had a really hard go of it. But those snakes, man. They ganged up on him. It wasn’t fair. Same thing with an even later scene, in which we follow a bobcat who is having a really garbage day at the office, barely able to catch a mouse. We watch her starve and hunt and fail and starve again, until she finds a hot spring where lots of little critters are available for nomming. But of course, she is a cat, and she hates water, and goes full Benny Hill on duck after duck, the poor thing. We feel bad for her. The efficacy of the iguana scene isn’t just sympathizing with prey over predator. We feel relief when the bobcat finally catches a squirrel. It’s not as intense or visceral, but we’re glad for her. And part of that is probably that snakes are scary looking and bobcats are fluffy and beautiful and look like the cat currently trying to sit on our keyboards, (remember that when you create aliens and fabulous monsters. Humans are suckers for a bit of fur and a big, dark eye), but the bobcat scene plays to our sense of fair play, too: nature is red in tooth and claw and all that, too bad, squirrelfriend, it wasn’t your day. Again, one on one. Adult v. adult. 

The iguana and the snakes violate the rules of fair play, and it’s incredibly upsetting to narrative creatures such as ourselves. We have been bobcats. We have been foxes. We have been ibexes, even. But as children, we were all iguanas, and that wound is still there, just waiting for a nice, friendly author to press on it and make us hurt all over again. 

So, when you sit down to work, consider the iguana. Make your readers feel as though they are the iguana. Because we all are, even—especially—those of us who are also snakes. We all see ourselves that way, the beautiful and brave and not-at-fault, fighting just for a chance at life. That is how people see themselves (they’re even right, a lot of the time) and it’s what they want to see in a protagonist that they’re expected to spend rather a lot of time with. Of course, you can write the whole thing from the point of view of the snakes, or at least one of them, and that’s what we call an anti-hero. It’s slightly more challenging, but half of television and a third of books are super into it right now. Still, in the end, so much narrative comes down to a small scaly child and a horde of snakes on a volcanic island, running in the sun, running to beat death and the twist ending and the inexorable squeeze of unfairness, which is never very far behind at all.