Storytelling—Casablanca Style

One of my favorite films, Casablanca, turned 77 on November 26. Whenever it’s on television, I never miss it. But what about it leads me to watch it over and over again? We do the same thing with movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and the Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.

Is it the nostalgia? Possibly.

Or is it because they check off all the right storytelling boxes?

Let’s stick with Casablanca. Our protagonist is the mysterious owner of a café in a very dangerous, exotic location against the backdrop of World War II. Our hero, or anti-hero, is Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), a man with a dark past. He’s known to have run guns to Ethiopia during its war with Italy and to have fought with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. But something in his past has made him bitter, unwilling to take sides. He says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

And yet, we see a soft side of Rick when the randy opportunist Captain Renault (Claude Rains) offers to trade letters of transit to a young couple, newlyweds and refugees, for sex. Okay, it’s never actually said out loud in the film, but it was 1933, and we know what Renault wants. Rick lets the husband win at roulette, allowing them enough cash to buy their way to safety.

Casablanca comes with a fabulous MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is an object or a device in a book or a movie that moves the plot forward but is largely irrelevant. In this case, it’s the letters of transit that the creepy Ugarte has stolen from two murdered Nazis. Ugarte is played by Peter Lorre and nobody does creepy any better than him.

The Germans are hot on his trail and he begs Rick to take the letters of transit and hide them until he can come back safely to retrieve them. They’re worth a fortune on the black market. Ugarte is arrested and eventually dies in captivity. In the words of Renault, “I’m making out the report now. We haven’t quite decided whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.”

The letters of transit are papers allowing their bearer to move about Nazi occupied Europe. They are the key to getting to a neutral country and safety

Enter the love interest. Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) is part of Rick’s dark history. She thought that her freedom fighter husband had died in a concentration camp and Ilsa had fallen in love with Rick. On the day that the Germans stormed into Paris, Rick and Ilsa were supposed to meet at the train station and leave for a safe haven. Rick waited at the train station in vain, never knowing why Ilsa never showed up, why she had forsaken him.

It wasn’t war that had made Rick bitter, it was lost love.

When she arrives in Casablanca, it is with her husband, alive and well, having escaped the concentration camp. Her husband, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) is a famed Czech resistance fighter, someone the Germans want badly to get their hands on again.

Lazlo and Ilsa need letters of transit to find their way to neutral Portugal and time to organize their fight against the Nazis. They need the letters of transit that Rick has in his possession.

So let’s review what we have here in this storytelling process. We have Casablanca, an exotic location in a dangerous part of the world during World War II. We have a strong, taciturn, hero who is reluctant to help anyone but himself. We have Rick’s former love, Ilsa, torn between her feelings for Rick and her love and loyalty that she has for her husband. We have Lazlo, who desperately wants to get his wife to safety but also to fight the Germans.

And then we have the bad guys. Captain Renault is part of the Vichy police force but willing to play both sides of the fence. But the actual villain is Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) willing to go any length to, once again, take Lazlo into custody.

And percolating behind the story is the tension between the French, yearning for their freedom, and the Nazis. One of the most stirring scenes of the film takes place when a group of Nazis gather around the piano at Rick’s Café and loudly sing “Deutschland Uber Alles”. Disgusted by what he hears, Victor Lazlo leads the band and the rest of the bar in singing “La Marseillaise”. It’s a duel of national anthems that the Nazis lose.

The story arc is nearly perfect. In the end, the bitter loner has regained his humanity and his patriotism. He proves his love to Ilsa by allowing her to leave with her husband, after she's tried to make a deal with Rick for the letters, telling him that she'd stay in Casablanca and leave her husband.

I won't tell you how the movie ends, although I'm sure anyone who's reading this has seen the film a dozen times. But for me, as schmaltzy as it is, I thought it was the perfect way to tie things up.

And finally, the movie has some of the most memorable lines in movie history. My favorite? “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Play it Sam.

Writing Weather

When I was growing up in Virginia, we lived "out in the country." Not deep country, but a few miles outside the city limits. Far enough out to have several acres of land, sloping down from the road as a driveway and stretching out in back toward a field that could be used for planting vegetables and small fruit trees could be grown. My father mowed this yard. But when autumn came, raking the leaves that had fallen from the huge hickory nut tree and blown down the hill from my uncles' houses on each side of ours -- raking the leaves was a ritual that my parents and my younger brother and I did together. First, we raked. Then the dogs ran through the leaves. Then we piled the leaves up again and burned them. The bright fall day would be filled with that wonderful smell of burning leaves as we leaned against our rakes.

Fall is my favorite season. Snuggle up on sofa with book season. Add blanket to bed season. Sleep late and eat oatmeal season. I have my own rituals now. The moment when I bring out my small heater. The first night I make cocoa. This is "sleeping weather" when I make up for all the uncomfortable nights when I tossed and turned even with the air conditioner on.

This is also writing weather. The weather when I wake up and go to my computer. Weather when I feel like a storyteller -- when there are readers gathered with me around a fireplace, listening as I weave my story. My cat naps on top of the radiator and time has slowed down.

Today, after three trips in two months (Kansas City, Missouri, Bouchercon in Dallas, New England Crime Bake in Massachusetts), I am home. I have work to do -- time has not slowed down. I have errands to take care of, students to meet with at school, reports to write. But when I sit down at my computer with my mug of cocoa, it is writing weather.

New beginnings

Barbara here. What an interesting, meandering examination of gender, identity, and character creation we have been having over here at Type M in the past couple of weeks. Several of us have also talked about changing hats and writing a new style, or creating a new series, and how that has enriched and invigorated their writing.

Writers face three challenges in continuing to write a long-running series. Firstly that they start to repeat themselves and fail to grow as writers, which most of us dread. Series allow us to stay with old friends we know so well that it takes little effort to get into their heads. It allows us to stay in comforting surroundings, using the neighbourhoods and background colour that has become as familiar as our own back yards. These two advantages are also the greatest pitfalls. Comfortable and familiar does not encourage risk, growth, or leaps of imagination.

The second challenge is that the series dictates the kind of story that can be told. My Inspector Green novels are police procedurals, and no matter what curves I throw at Green nor what detours my stories take, a police procedural has the particular flow of a police investigation. Moreover, all the stories have to take place in Ottawa (well, I cheat a little) because that is where Green has jurisdiction.

The third challenge derives from reader expectations. Both Rick and Vicki had alluded to this notion that a reader buys a book expecting a particular kind of story, and may rebel if they don't get it. The Green stories are gritty and realistic, but with a heavier emphasis on psychology than on blood and gore. If the next book turned out cozy (or serial-killer horror), I would likely get a slew of complaining emails. Writers, and their publishers, deviate from the winning "formula" at their peril.

But writers get all kinds of story ideas involving different heroes and places, and those stories can't be shoehorned into a police investigation in Ottawa. Writers of long-standing series sometimes solve this feeling of straitjacket by writing occasional standalones. Or by writing a second series, which is sufficiently different in tone, form, and setting that they can explore new vistas and experiment with new styles.

This is why the start of 2015 marks a new beginning for me as well, as I embark on a new three-book contract for a completely different series. There are ten books in the Green series, and it seemed like a solid place to take a break and explore something new. Green will be back, and I suspect I will be delighted to reconnect with him when I am ready. But for now, I am deep in the world of a very different character.

First off, my main character is a woman. I always thought it amusing that authors were often mistaken for their main character, or that the lines between author and character blurred, because Green was quite clearly distinct from me. Although as any author knows, not as distinct as one might think.

My new character is also not me. Amanda Doucette is a lot younger than me, the age of my daughters in fact, and is still searching for her place and her path, which allows her to have adventures and experiences which I get to share vicariously. Always fun for a writer. But she shares many of my passions and my values, and is in some ways who I might have been had I been young in today's world. I became a psychologist to help people; she became an international aid worker. She is resourceful and smart, determined and action-oriented, yet she struggles with what she has seen. She is a powerful and interesting person for me as a writer to spend time with, and I hope readers will think so too.

The setting of my new series is a wholly different concept as well. Each book will take place in a different setting across Canada, the first one in Newfoundland and the second in Quebec's Laurentian Mountains. I hope to explore wonderful locales across the country, taking myself on adventures and never growing tired of one place. Some of these adventures I will take in person, as on last fall's Newfoundland trip, but some of it will be within my own living room, as these photos attest.