Role of a Lifetime

By Jessica Lake

I finally understand my Sex Without the Sex fantasies.

It's about fucking time.

The secret?

I am few cards short of a human being.

I am defined by my neurodivergence.

For years I concentrated on their most obvious feature: transformation.

A young man becomes a woman.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Different characters. Different circumstances. Different genres. Sometimes comedy. Sometimes horror. Sometimes romance. Sometimes science fiction. Sometimes something approaching a fairy tale.

But underneath all that invention is an embarrassingly repetitive machine.

The transformation itself is practically a ritual.

Certain things happen first. Certain things happen next. The body changes in roughly the same sequence. Each change is resisted emotionally, then incorporated. Once incorporated, another change begins.

Over and over.

Strip away the costumes, villains, jokes, sex, settings, and plots, and many of the stories are essentially the same story.

So why did I keep writing them?

Because the repetitive part wasn’t the story.

It was the backbone on which I hung the story.

Me a Protagonist?

There was one constraint I apparently would not violate.

The protagonist had to be me.

Not literally Jessica Lake. The protagonist might be Roger or Jonathan or Alan or any number of invented people.

But structurally, he had to operate like me.

That creates a serious problem for a writer.

Put me on a blank page by myself and very little happens.

I stabilize.

Once I know where everything is, once I understand the rules, once the surprises have stopped coming, I can remain there indefinitely.

I don’t necessarily become unhappy.

I become stationary.

There is no obvious next place to go because there is no strong internally generated destination pulling me toward it.

That’s terrible fiction.

A protagonist is supposed to want something.

Desire generates motion. The protagonist wants something; something prevents her from getting it; she acts; the world pushes back; she acts again.

There’s your story.

My protagonist just sits there.

So I had to invent someone else.

The Antagonist

I thought the antagonist was the villain.

Of course I did.

The antagonist poisons him, manipulates him, alters him, humiliates him, traps him, deceives him, pushes him somewhere he insists he doesn’t want to go.

But I had misunderstood the antagonist’s real function.

The antagonist supplies what the protagonist lacks.

Direction.

The protagonist cannot generate the adventure, so the antagonist generates it for him.

The antagonist has desires.

The antagonist has plans.

The antagonist knows where this is going.

The protagonist doesn’t.

They are therefore doing something peculiar together.

The antagonist provides the destination.

The protagonist provides the adaptation.

Together, they can finally have an adventure.

Resistance Without Resistance

There still has to be conflict.

Otherwise there isn’t much of a story.

But my protagonist cannot truly resist. If he could simply plant his feet, defend an existing identity and say, No. This is who I am, most of these stories would end on page three.

So he does something else.

He suffers.

That distinction turns out to matter enormously.

The protagonist experiences humiliation, fear, shame, loss, embarrassment and grief. These emotions establish that something important is happening.

He is no longer stationary.

He is alive.

And negative emotions work particularly well for this purpose. They are loud. They announce themselves. They make the transition consequential.

Something has been lost.

Something has changed.

The world is no longer what it was.

Now comes the part I had misunderstood for years.

Victory

He adapts.

That’s the payoff.

The new reality initially seems impossible. Then difficult. Then manageable.

And finally—

Normal.

He has done it.

He has mastered the new configuration.

What looked like degradation from outside is experienced from inside the machinery as an accomplishment.

Look what I can do.

Then the machine starts again.

Destabilization.

Difficulty.

Suffering.

Adaptation.

Stability.

And once stability returns, the story needs another push.

So the antagonist takes something else.

Another boundary disappears.

Another configuration becomes impossible.

Another one must be learned.

Again the protagonist suffers.

Again he adapts.

Again he wins.

And because he has stabilized again, he is ready for another round.

The process continues until there is nowhere else the story needs to take him.

The Actor

The metaphor that finally made this comprehensible was an actor.

Imagine Tommy.

Tommy is an extraordinary actor.

But between productions he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

He gets up. Makes coffee. Reads. Shops. Goes for walks. Goes to bed.

Nothing is particularly wrong.

Nothing is happening.

Then the telephone rings.

We want you to read for Hamlet.

Suddenly Tommy has a destination.

He reads the script.

He studies Hamlet.

He rehearses.

He gets things wrong.

He takes direction.

He changes.

Every day he becomes better at being Hamlet until opening night arrives.

Then Tommy walks onto the stage—

and for three hours he is Hamlet.

He has Hamlet’s history.

Hamlet’s enemies.

Hamlet’s loves.

Hamlet’s grief.

Hamlet’s purpose.

Hamlet knows what matters.

And therefore Tommy knows what matters.

At the end of the performance the audience rises.

Tommy bows.

He has done it.

For three hours he wasn’t somebody pretending to be Hamlet.

He was Hamlet.

Then the production closes.

Tommy goes home.

Makes coffee.

Reads the newspaper.

Waits.

That is the piece I had been missing.

Nobody Home

When I say there is “no one there,” I have to be careful.

Obviously there is someone there.

There is a personality. There are abilities, habits, knowledge, humor, moral rules, temperament and ways of responding to the world.

Those remain.

What is missing is something different.

There is no role currently being enacted that contains its own destination.

The actor is still there.

The character isn’t.

A role solves that problem.

Give the actor a sufficiently complete role and suddenly everything organizes around it.

There is somewhere to go.

There are things to learn.

There are problems to solve.

There are standards by which success can be measured.

Most importantly, there is somebody to become.

Tell me who to be.

That line has appeared in different forms throughout my life and writing.

I thought it expressed submission.

Now I think it expresses something more fundamental.

Give me the role and I can move.

The Strange Partnership

That completely changes the relationship between protagonist and antagonist in these stories.

They aren’t simply enemies.

They need each other.

The protagonist supplies something extraordinary: adaptability.

The antagonist supplies what adaptability cannot supply for itself: direction.

The antagonist says:

We’re going there.

The protagonist says:

No.

But they go.

The protagonist suffers because movement hurts.

He loses the familiar configuration before the new one has become stable.

Then he learns.

Adjusts.

Perfects.

Stabilizes.

And eventually turns around almost triumphantly:

Look.

Look what I’ve become.

There is pride in these stories that I had completely missed.

Not pride in being defeated.

Pride in adaptation.

The protagonist has been thrown into another impossible world and mastered it.

This is home now.

This is normal.

I know how everything works.

I know who I am supposed to be here.

And eventually there comes something resembling gratitude toward the very person who caused the upheaval.

That once seemed perverse to me.

It doesn’t anymore.

Without the antagonist there would have been no journey.

No danger.

No transformation.

No achievement.

No story.

The protagonist would still be sitting at home waiting for the telephone to ring.

The Shapeshifter

So perhaps these were never primarily transformation fantasies.

They were stories about a shapeshifter who cannot choose a shape.

A liquid has no difficulty becoming the shape of its container.

But it cannot choose its own container.

Pour it into something and it conforms.

Leave it alone and it simply settles.

My protagonists settle.

Then somebody arrives carrying a mold.

The process of being poured into it is frightening, humiliating, painful and exciting.

But eventually every surface fits.

Every empty space is filled.

The movement stops.

The protagonist looks around.

Home.

And for one magnificent moment there is no uncertainty at all.

Someone told him who to be.

He became that person.

And he became that person beautifully.