Do You Need an Emotional Support Animal?
Week 2 Secret Sauce Writing Challenge. Bookends, the empathy effect, and transforming your archetypal character through a support or spirit animal.
In Week 2’s Secret Sauce Writing Challenge:
Design Your Animal-Inspired Bookend and post in the comments
See how THE BEAR TV series used animal symbolism in the pilot/finale breakdown video
Create the “empathy effect” for your character using archetypes
Add a ticking clock and a desperate need for money like THE BEAR
Download your Premise and Secret Sauce Templates
Week 2: Add Secret Sauce with Animal Bookend
You can approach our writing challenge of crafting an unforgettable character that creates an “empathy effect” by using an “animal bookend“ to add secret sauce to your story—in one of two ways.
Give Your Character an Emotional Support Animal
The first way could be to give your character anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders that cause them to need an emotional support animal, like in the TV series THE HEALING POWERS OF DUDE on Netflix.
Further, you can craft a bookend using the emotional support animal (like Dude) to show your character’s level and flavor of conviction by contrasting your story's opening with the ending (of a feature, book, or series 1).
If you choose this scenario, raise the stress, obstacles, and stakes to the point where your main character must turn to the emotional support animal (or not) to defeat their antagonist and get what they want.
EXTRA WRITING TIP: Imagine an emotional support animal inadvertently lifting your character’s mood while causing more stress and challenges. Remember that in the presence of this emotional support animal, it’s your character who casts the judgment, not the animal. Also, the animal can inspire your main character to connect with others in a new way to reach their goals.
Give Your Character a Spirit Animal
The second way you can create an indelible character using an “animal bookend“ device coupled with exposing a character’s weakness through archetype to create the “empathy effect” on the audience is to mirror the hit Hulu series THE BEAR.
From premise to character to conflict, THE BEAR is full of secret sauce techniques and food conflict. Numerous “bear” symbolism are embedded in the title, theme, setting, dialogue, and kitchen taglines.
This week’s focus is on writing a bookend, which involves combining your character’s “inner animal” with its “archetype” to create inner/outer forces that inspire story transformation and win audience approval.
Design an Animal-Inspired Bookend
THE BEAR TV series, created by Christopher Storer and starring Jeremy Allen White as Carmy Berzatto, achieves the “empathy effect” on an audience by using a bookend inspired by the spirit animal, the bear, combined with his archetypal transformation from The Child to The Ruler.
Week 2 - The Animal Spirit Bookend: What’s Ahead
Discover the animal-inspired bookend writing challenge.
View THE BEAR’s pilot/final breakdown video.
Review character archetypes as we continue exploring methods for adding Your Story’s Secret Sauce.
Start Your Secret Sauce Challenge: Design a Bookend
Week 2—Writing Challenge: Write a bookend using animal symbolism to infuse your story with accelerated flavor and conviction so that audiences will fall in love with your story’s premise, character, and conflict. Integrate your bookend with the knowledge of archetypes to exact the “empathy effect” by revealing your character’s archetypal weakness to make your audience relate to and root for your hero/heroine.
Bookend directions
OPENING BOOKEND: Your opening bookend should illustrate your character interacting with an animal and an object and show the character’s archetypal weakness.
CLOSING BOOKEND: Your closing bookend should show how your character interacts with or relates to the animal and object in a new way, as the animal and object’s meaning will have transformed. It should also show how the character’s archetypal weakness has changed to strength.
MASTERWORK: View THE BEAR’s pilot video breakdown, starring Jeremy Allen White, created by Christopher Storer. THE BEAR is a comeback story. It uses a bookend inspired by the spirit animal, the bear, to hook the audience.
VIDEO Breakdown of THE BEAR, TV Series Pilot
View the VIDEO BREAKDOWN of THE BEAR’s Perfect First Episode from the BenFromCanada YouTube Channel.
In this video breakdown, we see how the pilot begins with the bear spirit animal bookend, encapsulating Carmy’s emotional story arc. We also see how “The Bear Within” helps Carmy manifest his goal in the S1 finale when “The Bear” literally shows up in cans of “Secret Tomato Sauce.”
For more background reading on THE BEAR:
Access THE BEAR’s pilot and S1 final episode plot summaries on Wikipedia HERE.
You can stream THE BEAR on Hulu.
START WRITING YOUR BOOKEND
I repeat the directions here again because it's good to help with the complexity of the writing challenge.
WHAT TO WRITE - STEP 1: Write your story’s opening bookend in 100 words based on THE BEAR's opening scene. You can describe your main character’s dream, nightmare, memory, or intuition, where they engage with a spirit animal and a physical object, and illustrate the character’s archetypal weakness to engage the audience so they root for them.
RECAP OPENING BOOKEND: Your opening bookend should illustrate your character interacting with an animal and an object and show the character’s archetypal weakness.
For example, in THE BEAR’s pilot episode opening scene, Carmy Berzotta unlocks the latch to a huge cage (physical object) that imprisons a live bear (spirit animal) during a dream. He wakes up shaken, hunched over, and looking weak.
Writing Tip: Describe the character’s encounter with the animal and the physical object as a way to symbolize the beginning of the character’s emotional story arc and archetypal weakness.
WHAT TO WRITE - STEP 2: Write the closing bookend of your story (the end of your feature, novel, or season 1 finale) that contrasts with your opening in which the character has changed (via an emotional arc) and encounters or uses the same physical object from the opening bookend in a new way. Show how the archetypal weakness has turned into a strength.
RECAP CLOSING BOOKEND: Your closing bookend should show how your character interacts with or relates to the animal and object in a new way, as the animal and object’s meaning will have transformed. It should also show how the character’s archetypal weakness has changed to strength.
For example, in THE BEAR’s S1 final episode, Carmy Berzotta hangs a sign in the window of the sandwich shop (physical object) that says The Bear (spirit animal) restaurant is coming. Carmy’s shoulders are rolled back, and he stands tall.
HOW: Write your opening/closing bookends in two narrative paragraphs using action lines or narrative descriptions of 100 words a piece.
YOU: Invoke your writer's conviction using your spirit animal in the kitchen and post your two 100-word opening/closing bookend in the comments.
ME: I will post my challenge in the comments. And, to engage with our writers, I will support them with feedback, posting compliments, and answering questions.
Secret Sauce Tip: Use Archetypes for Empathy Effect
Creating audience empathy thickens the secret sauce. Besides conviction, empathy is another main ingredient of a story’s secret sauce, and that comes when unique characters are found in unbelievable circumstances, like Carmy, a top chef who is making sandwiches.
Make the audience feel that love vibration for your character. Get their mirror neurons firing in their brain so they resonate with the character “crying on the floor.” Make the audience watch, wish, and hope the main character will still get what they want. This is the “empathy effect” in THE BEAR's opening bear dream/kitchen scenes.
Over the course of S1, we root for Carmy to resurrect his family name, his brother, and his culinary vision in the new restaurant The Bear.
For the audience to identify with your protagonist, they must be able to relate to an archetypal or universal character type.
Here is a short list of popular character archetypes:
THE BEAR’S ARCHETYPAL TRANSFORMATION
The secret to Carmy’s success was stashed in the secret sauce.
Opening Bear Bookend: The opening “Bear Bookend” used in THE BEAR TV series invokes audience empathy by showing Carmy’s inner weakness, as illustrated by The Child archetype. Then, from his weak position, we continue to learn that all stems from this opening and that Carmy is the younger brother who lost his older brother.
He is motherless until S2 (dark mother cream ingredient) and must rally the old family he left behind to make sandwiches so he can dream about his vision for a new restaurant.
Closing Bear Bookend: In the S1 finale, the story delivers a sense of earned victory through Carmy’s archetypal transformation from The Child to The Ruler using the spirit of the bear symbolism.
Carmy rallies his family team, bringing his vision for “The Bear” restaurant to life by finally facing his brother’s death and opening his heart to make the family staple spaghetti recipe. This change of heart results in him finding the money he needs stashed inside his brother’s tomato sauce cans.
Now he has the financing to open his vision of The Bear restaurant, and everyone is on board.
The Bear connects Carmy to all the other story ingredients:
Carmy “The Bear” Berzatto portrays The Child archetype who comes home to run the sandwich shop only to discover he’s forced to take on the role of Papa Bear (The Ruler) after his brother’s untimely death.
Here are more ways that “the bear animal spirit” connects Carmy to others:
The bear symbolism connects his Berzatto name to the story’s premise of coming home to find “others” in the kitchen he’s inherited.
The bear connects Carmy to the “hungry as a bear” family theme.
The bear lives up to the “ferocious” inner/outer conflicts Carmy faces, setting the show’s chaotic tone and high-energy kitchen conflict.
Add a Ticking Clock and Desperate Need for Money
As you plot your story to create the opening and closing, consider using these two writing tips to rev up the pacing of your narrative drive (central conflict).
Add a ticking clock and a need for money.
Here’s how these devices worked in THE BEAR.
In S1 of THE BEAR, money is short and scarce. The clock is ticking to repay his uncle’s loan and surprise!
Just in time, the cash Carmy needs to open his new restaurant shows up in cans of tomato sauce!
His brother, now on the other side, had stashed the loot in the secret sauce, leaving behind a recipe for spaghetti. That’s how Carmy funds the new restaurant called The Bear for S2.
Add Your Story’s Secret Sauce through Animal Spirits and Archetypes = Hooks the Audience into Rooting for Your Main Character.
Download our PRE-WRITING CHALLENGE Premise Template and Add Your Secret Sauce Recipe Template from Week 1’s post.
CHEAT SHEET: Your Story’s Secret Sauce Recipe
What to do next?
Write your Challenge and show us (or me) your character’s animal-inspired bookend. Pull ideas from your premise and secret sauce ingredients. If you’d like to email it to me, hit reply!
Below, you can download my personally completed secret sauce writing challenge exercise for creating a bookend. This exercise connected with my character’s morning montage exercise from Week 1 and gave space for the story to incorporate a mermaid trope.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe now for story waves of insight and creativity! Never miss an update.
Get the discounted $79 ANNUAL subscription or $8/month to receive:
Growing Archive of all Story Wave posts, writing workshops, teaching videos, downloadable class notes, and templates
Join Story Waves Writing Challenges
Story Waves Community of writing support and paid posts
Get the discounted $159 FULL ACCESS subscription to receive:
Access to STORY GROUP and work with me every first Sunday of the month, 2-3:30 pm EST, where I demo page rewrites live from volunteers and teach from my Story Waves lessons.
Receive a $100 discount on all Story Consultations.
p.s. Replays will be available for workshops. Watch them at your convenience.
✨ Invest in yourself and your Story! Commit to one year with my guidance and get the discounted annual subscription. You, your writing, and your career are worth it.
I look forward to reading your stories and connecting in 2024!
Happy writing,
Kelly E. Keough