2 Things Author Taylor Jenkins Reid Does Right
Taylor Jenkins Reid is my queen!
I’ve said those words on the blog before, and I stand by them. But today, I want to talk about why.
Specifically, I’d like to take a look at her viral stories: Daisy Jones & The Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto is Back, and pick apart 2 specific things at which Reid excels.
1 | Dangling the carrot
In each of the stories I mentioned above, Reid starts her novel in a very specific way: by dangling a carrot in the form of an interesting flash forward.
In Daisy Jones & The Six we are promised a glimpse into one of the most famous and well-loved rock bands of all time. Specifically, their one and only tour that led to their very publicized and scandalous breakup.
In The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo we’re told we’re getting a rare peek into the personal life of one of Holllywood’s most glamorous starlets—and one of the biggest magnets for scandal in the industry.
In Malibu Rising we’re shown the devastation of a fire in Malibu, California. One centered around an infamous party filled with some of the biggest celebrities in Los Angeles.
In Carrie Soto is Back we’re shown Carrie Soto, the most decorated female tennis player of all time, watching as her record is toppled. We’re in her head as she tries to decide whether or not she’ll risk coming out of retirement in order to win back her title.
Why do these flash forwards work?
Flash forwards are a very specific storytelling tool that is used to hook readers. By getting a glimpse of something interesting or exciting to come, we’re more likely to stick around for the ride.
But Reid does more than simply utilizing the tool of flash forwards—she slathers these glimpses of the future with story butter. Those tropes, situations, dynamics, and emotions we, as the audience, devour until we’re licking the last bits off our fingers.
Here are just a few butterific things we can highlight in the simple summaries above for these stories hooks:
Daisy Jones: fame, scandal, fallouts, talent, music (rock bands), affairs, forbidden love, addiction, rags to riches
Evelyn Hugo: fame, gossip, Hollywood, affairs, glamor, wealth, behind-the-scenes, rags to riches, secrets
Malibu Rising: fame, scandal (hmm, pattern?), destruction, family, talent, glamor, rags to riches
Carrie Soto: fame, mastery, ruthlessness, comebacks, competition, beating the odds
Yes, clearly Reid has some themes with which she resonates: she loves a story of a downtrodden woman rising to fame and glamor—and encountering plenty of scandal, heartbreak, and difficult choices along the way.
But she’s not the only one who resonates with these ideas!
We all love them, which is why her stories are so popular. Because she taps into things readers deeply enjoy.
We love to read about glamor, but especially when we get to see the darker side of fame and success. We love talent, but we don’t want to see someone with a great deal of talent come into their success to easily—they ought to encounter obstacles, struggles, and heartache along the way. We love to read about scandalous love affairs, broken families, and hard-earned success. And in just the first few pages of her books, Reid is able to promise us all of this.
2 | Emotional progress in every scene
This is the bigger thing that struck me when I recently picked up Reid’s most recent release (Carrie Soto Is Back).
Reid’s stories often follow the trajectory of a talented woman on her rise to fame and success. But the truth is, if we were to simply read that story, we’d get bored. Because it doesn’t matter how interesting the external pieces of a story are if there is no internal growth. (Yes, I am a broken record.)
And this is where another of Reid’s strengths comes into play: she moves us forward both emotionally and physically in the character’s journey. In every scene.
Let’s look at Carrie Soto, which is the story I’m reading now, so it’s freshest in my mind.
In terms of plot, things move forward fairly quickly. In the first scene, we’re introduced to Carrie as she watches someone surpass her record, propelling her to make the decision of whether or not she will come out of retirement in order to reclaim her title as the best.
This instantly invests us in Carrie’s motivation, pain, and trajectory. From that point forward, we get to see what happened in the years we missed: i.e., her birth through her retirement five years before the start of the story. This moves quickly as Reid introduces us to the life circumstances that went into her extreme determination and ambition and the hurdles she had to overcome in order to reach the point at which we were introduced to her.
But more than that, we are drawn deeper and deeper into Carrie’s emotional journey. To demonstrate further, I’d like to point out 3 things:
The Pain
The Investment
The Sidetracks
The Pain
I’ve said this before on the blog, but I’ll repeat it again here (and, probably, many times in the future): a character’s pain is what engages a reader.
I heard this put so succinctly and beautifully in one of New York Times bestselling author Adrienne Young’s workshops. She said that pain (and, I’d add, desire/longing) is what connects readers to characters. She said,
“Readers fuse to characters through their wounds.”
This is so true I want to sing it from the rooftops!
Pay attention when you pick up any story. The characters you end up rooting for, caring for, and feeling the most invested in are the characters whose pain you feel the most acutely. This doesn’t have to always be overly traumatic pain. (I love you Kaz Brekker, but we’re not talking about you right now.)
To demonstrate this, let’s look at Lara Jean Covey from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. She’s a shy high school girl who’s lived a safe and loved life.
But author Jenny Han shows us her pain and desire. Lara Jean loves her sister’s boyfriend, but she loves her sister more, and so she keeps her painful secret. In addition, she feels loneliness and fear because her heart still hurts even years after her mother’s unexpected death.
Though the story is lighthearted and sweet, her pain is both real and on the page.
In Carrie Soto, although I won’t go into spoilers, we feel Carrie’s pain.
Bonus Tip: A Threat to Self-Worth
I sometimes like to think of pain as the thing that will threaten a character’s self-worth.
For Carrie, her self-worth—all of it—is in her game, in being the best in the world. We get a glimpse of that in the first scene, and then have that truth absolutely cemented over the first quarter of the book, as we see Carrie’s discovery of tennis and rise to the top.
For other characters, their self-worth might be wrapped up in their family, in their job, in their kindness, in their money, in their ability to protect someone they love, etc.
Take Taken, for example. I’ve never even seen the film, but I can tell you right now, just from the trailer and the basic premise of the movie, that Liam Neeson’s self-worth comes from his role as a father and a protector. When that is threatened, his pain detonates. He becomes invested in the conflict. And so do we.
The Investment
This is a concept I’ve been thinking about recently as I re-watch Stranger Things.
Jim Hopper, the Chief of Police, is flippant about the disappearance of Will Byers when Will’s mother first comes to him in the pilot episode. He thinks Will is skipping school and having fun. He makes jokes and tries to pacify Will’s mom when she borders on hysteria.
But as the season continues, Hopper becomes more and more invested in the main conflict (Wills disappearance). Not just in terms of the mystery and his drive to solve it, but in terms of his emotional pain. As we learn more of Hopper’s backstory, we see the reflections of his past in what’s happening for him now, how this problem is triggering his trauma, and how this case (which he once made jokes about) might just be the most personal thing that’s happened to him in a long time.
The writers invest him more in the conflict. And, as a result, us too, both in terms of the story at large and in terms of Hopper as a character. We love him more the more we see his pain and how entwined it becomes with Will’s disappearance.
In Carrie Soto, as we learn Carrie’s backstory and what it means for her personally to tackle the main conflict of the novel, we become more invested in the story as a whole, and in Carrie as a protagonist.
The Sidetracks
As I said, Carrie Soto Is Back moves quickly as a story. We are introduced to Carrie and her goal, her pain, and her circumstances. We learn how she got started as a tennis player and how she was able to move up the ranks and gain recognition and success.
But then, seemingly at random, we are pulled into a side story about Carrie’s first experience with a boy when she was fifteen-years-old.
On the surface, this seems like a sidetrack that might pull a reader out of the story. Yes, most of the fans picking up a Taylor Jenkins Reid novel are likely interested in a little romance, so, in one sense, Reid was simply slathering on a bit of butter. But it still might not have worked if Reid hadn’t remembered the cardinal rule:
Emotional progress and external progress.
So while Carrie’s first romance didn’t have a lot of impact on her tennis trajectory, Reid profoundly shows us how it had an impact on her emotional growth by showing us how it shaped her worldview, and thus, her goals in life.
Every scene in a story should progress a reader further along both tracks: the plot track (toward the overall story goal involving the primary conflict) and the emotional track (showing us the character’s growth and transformation).
There are, of course, many, many other things Taylor Jenkins Reid does well as a writer, but these two concepts: dangling carrots and keeping her eye on the emotional progress of her characters, are two of the biggest reasons her stories are so popular.
And the good news is, they’re incredibly easy to incorporate into our own stories as writers.
Don’t forget to grab your Story Map!
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