In 1895 Georges Polti, carrying on the work of Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, identified 36 “dramatic situations” which he hoped spanned the gamut of options open to writers. By 2004 Christopher Booker, founder of Private Eye, sceptic of smoking bans, asbestos harms, climate change and the EU, had whittled this list down to 7 “basic stories”. This feels more useful but is still trumped by the immaculate story editor Kate Leys who proposed a single narrative archetype she claims can describe all stories - “a stranger comes to town.” I find this idea very useful, not least because if you can define what a story is then that helps you see when you are not yet telling one.
I can’t improve on this but in the same spirit I’ve been thinking about not what a story is but what a story does. Some writers reach for crowd pleasing uplift, some controversy and acclaim. Some eschew popular success for the adulation of a few, some just want to share their truth. Thinking too quickly, the impact of a story often feels like happy endings being “commercial” and therefore successful but somehow, you know, bad; whilst tragic endings are tougher and probably better, carrot juice for the soul.
This though is of course nonsense. Take Romeo and Juliet, where love across a social divide ends in heartbreaking tragedy and 400 years worth of applause. It’s tragic for the lovers but for the audience their shared demise is weirdly uplifting in the way it reassures us about the power and importance of love. A real tragedy would instead be to witness the couple bitterly live out their days in Mantua divided by proximity and too many kids.
There are, I think, only two types of impact that a story can have. Whatever you do it will either offer comfort or discomfort. Sometimes this is easy to spot, the apparently contrarian positions Christopher Booker took, smoking doesn’t kill you, climate change isn’t happening, foreign bureaucrats are to blame, all offer comforting portraits of a life mainly troubled by people fussing too much with an individual’s freedom. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, but a popular one because its message is comforting, that spark you feel is real and does last forever, even if you don’t.
I’ve been lucky enough to work recently on a fascinating and heartbreaking project with The Mixed Museum, helping to the tell the stories of the “Brown Babies”, the mixed race children of black American GIs. Now mainly in their 80s this unique cohort have lived with the complicated, often painful legacy of “illegitimacy”, of racism and with the story of their origin being shrouded in secrecy and shame. Their personal stories of unravelling their identities and reconnecting with lost families in the US are heartbreaking and heart warming in equal measure but some of the hard truths surrounding their births viscerally reframe the narrative of the 2nd World War in ways I knew without ever really knowing.
I have long been aware, somewhere in the back of my head, that the US Army of the 1940s was not a progressive institution. It served pre-civil rights America, Jim Crow America and I knew that of course it reflected that outlook in a disparity of treatment between its black and white troops. However I don’t think I’d quite acknowledged the extent to which US Army enforced segregation and imposed it on its allies. I did not know, for instance, that the US explicitly marked different villages in Somerset as white or black. Or that that US law superseded British rule for all matters concerning US troops stationed in this country.
Whilst many of the GI babies we spoke to were the result of affairs with women whose British husbands were away fighting, there are many cases where US soldiers and unmarried locals just happened to fall in love in the old fashioned Romeo and Juliet manner. To marry, the soldiers needed permission from their white superior officers. Not only was this permission never granted to black soldiers, they were then threatened with a charge of rape which, under US law, was a capital offence. The difference was so stark that even local people and parliamentarians complained, arguing that there was no death penalty for this crime in Britain and the Americans had no right to impose it. None of the US troops hanged in the UK by US law were white.
This forces me to totally reframe my understanding of the war against Nazism in ways that are not comfortable. This is not the soft focus racism of uninformed name calling, the racism we pride ourselves on having sort of grown out of. This is the blunt racism of white supremacy, the very thing we’re taught the war was against.
Of course freedom is a contested concept. I never imagined that the simple narrative of the liberal democratic West teaming up to beat back the illiberal shadows of fascism was as clear cut or as noble as it became in retrospect. It is true that the chimera of freedom is what drew a great many members of the oppressed global majority in both the US and the wider British Empire to offer up their service and their lives, imagining, hoping, that victory would bring recognition, gratitude. The Black GIs were volunteers. The freedom non-white soldiers fought for was not the same freedom that the US and the British thought they were preserving.
It is not just victor’s history that paints the fight against Hitler as a moral conflict, when in truth the war was a brawl between racists who learnt only to never again fight on their own doorsteps. The story we grew up with, a narrative that unites work as diverse as Indiana Jones, Captain America, Inglorious Basterds and Dad’s Army, is also fundamentally one of comfort. It celebrates a job well done rather than seeking to inspire by laying bare how much work is still ours to do.
This though is the real thrill, the power of uncomfortable storytelling. It is not simply to tear down idols or instil despair. It is not, as many think, to disrespect the story we have been told. It is to excite with the prospect of what is to come.
There’s something too comfortable about tragic stories that seem to prove how futile it is to fight for change. The uncomfortable story of the Second World War is not that freedom was only won by the stronger force of white supremacy. It’s that though that force tried to erase the contributions of so many, of the black soldiers, the brown soldiers, of gay genius Alan Turing, in the decades that followed the conflict no one let the battle rest. Civil rights, decolonisation, equal marriage were not gifts given for the valour shown in a fight against a genuinely shared enemy, they were hard won treasures in a battle for freedom that we’re all still fighting to this day.
What does your story offer? Is it comfort or fire?
On my 9 week screenwriting course I hope to empower writers to tell whatever kind of story is most important to them by demystifying conventional writing advice and offering instead a few simple tools that have always helped me. You can find more information and book your place here.
Another story from the hidden history of the fight of the global majority in World War II is that of George Dukson seen here photobombing General DeGaulle on a walk down the Champs-Élysées.
As Gary Younge writes in his retelling of Dukson’s life…
In a memo stamped ‘confidential,’ General Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith wrote: “It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of White personnel. This would indicate the 2nd Armoured Division, which with only one fourth native personnel was the only French division operationally available that could be made one hundred per cent White.” In reality, this was easier said than done. Two thirds of the Free French forces were in fact colonial troops.
You can read Younge’s full piece here with thanks, as ever, to Chris Blaine to drawing my attention to it.