The Monster: How To Live a Different Story

On one of the seven basic plots

I: Telling Stories

We’re always telling ourselves stories.

A few years ago, I realized I was telling myself a story of being alone. I would literally repeat the mantra to myself: you are alone. I felt it at work, at home. I especially felt it during times of conflict and doubt—times when things weren’t working out. And the way forward was entirely dependent on me, or so I thought.

You are alone.

It’s a particular story, or the beginning of one. For the beginning of every story has a problem. And alongside the problem sits a longing. This particular story spoke to both individualism and victimhood. Being alone meant self-dependence and perfectionism (after all, everything depended on me). It also meant—and I believe we all enter adulthood with some form of this story—that I had been abandoned in some way.

I cannot say where the you are alone mantra began. It saddens me to know that my daughters will have some form of a similar story. Mine resulted in a Sisyphean effort: there was always another rock to push uphill. Life was about pushing and trying and, eventually, exhaustion.

I’ve learned the healing of false stories begins with their articulation. I had to recognize this mantra—and accompanying story—I was telling myself.

II: The Monster

Many students of story have attempted to distill all stories into a few buckets. There are 7 basic plots, or 20, or 3, or 36. For myself, I’m biased toward Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots, if only because it’s one of the most comprehensive out there (written over 30 years and running over 700 pages, which seems a lot for only 7 plots), and it’s one of the story formulations I’ve read that isn’t trying to tell you how to sell stories, but how to understand them, and why we might tell them in the first place.

Booker opens with the plot structure of Overcoming the Monster. This is one of the most basic of all story plots, a primitive story that taps into our fears: a good versus evil story, low on frills and complexity. The hero is often an underdog and has to overcome a monstrous villain.

Beowulf is an overcoming the monster story. So are most James Bond movies (think of those evil villains with patches over their eyes—symbolic monsters). Jurassic Park. Most of the Marvel cinematic universe gives us a straightforward battle between evil and good, and the hero overcomes some sort of monster.

The Bible is replete with these. David and Goliath. The book most filled with overcoming the monster stories, however, might be Daniel. He’s either dreaming of beasts or literally getting thrown into pits with them, and if we include the apocrypha, he goes on to defeat a dragon.

Photo by Shanti Donato on Unsplash

The simplicity of the monster story means it’s always popular—especially in a society without the attendant means (either the tools of technology or tools of attention) to engage in more complex stories. Thus, a society that converses most often in sound bites or one without attention to long arguments will necessarily tend to “overcoming the monster” type stories. (These aren’t the only reasons a society or people might come up with “overcoming the monster” type stories—you would also expect them if a people were being oppressed in some way.)

In our society, we tend toward “monster” language in political contexts, partially because of the tools we have for conversation. It immediately does two things: 1) places the one telling the story as the underdog, and 2) defines their opponent as a monster unworthy of consideration. When this fully infects a conversation—as, when both sides do it—the result is a shouting match.

Sound familiar?

III: Wrath

If the seven basic plots could be laid next to another famous list of seven—the seven deadly sins—the overcoming the monster plot would be about fear and, ultimately, wrath. We fear monsters, whether Goliaths or velociraptors rampaging an island. And fear places us either in fight or flight mode. But we cannot flee all the time; we must learn to fight.

This is an important truth: fear is not the final emotion that politics, or certain forms of religion feed on. Rather, they feed on the wrath that fear induces, for wrath makes you feel powerful.

The story: you’re afraid of what might happen and must exert your power and control to ensure the right ending comes about. We see this politically, as every decision is loaded with good and evil language (or, absent moral language, every decision becomes an existential decision). We see it religiously, when religious schema are based on shame and fear. This leads to manipulation of others and, eventually, manipulation of God (as any shame-based system is doubly-manipulative).

IV: Feeling Powerful

Your fears could even lead you to a place of thinking that you’re alone, and you alone must fix the problem at work or in your family. And if you’re honest, you wouldn’t resolve to do this for the good of others; you’d do it with anger in your belly. After all, that anger makes you feel powerful.

Or so I’ve heard.

V: Reframing the Story

The overcoming the monster story needs reframing. As I read the Bible stories about the monster, it’s precisely when people engage their own wrath and act violently that things go wrong. The apocalyptic stories of monsters show a better way. Daniel paints the picture of a man committed to God and refusing to fear the monsters, whether the king or a den of lions. Lest we forget, this commitment to God also meant a commitment toward the good of his present community—a nation where he had been kidnapped and placed in the royal court against his will, and now was forced to work for the good of that hostile nation’s government.

Imagine if Russia (I’m a child of the ‘80s) invaded the U.S., carted a number of people away, and was now relying on the expertise of those exiled people. Bring good to them is what the story is telling us.

Similarly, Revelation shows a group of people who never lift a finger against the Roman Empire in the classic sense of revolt: instead, their roles are to be faithful witnesses. They are to stubbornly point to another ruler and reality than the one most immediate. They are to insist things aren’t as they ought to be—and there is an ought to how they should be—and the ruler and reality and ought are all revealed in the life of a first century Jewish man from Palestine. And the New Testament tells followers of that man that they should pay their taxes and get along with their neighbors and work for the good of the Roman Empire—while stubbornly insisting there’s more beyond this present reality, shown in how they gather for meals regardless of class, how they care for the poor, how they refuse the power dynamics of sex outside marriage, how inside marriage men must look to give of themselves rather than rule the household (bringing men down three or four notches), and all of this points to a different reality, a different story.

The monster is not overcome by shouting or violence or individual heroism. It’s overcome by communities stubbornly focused on a future reality of grace, justice, love, hope, empathy, and faith in the power of this first century Jewish man to bring all of this to fruition, so those followers are not simply pie-in-the-sky Pollyannas who hope a better future is breaking into the present, but whose belief quite literally brings that future into the present.

The Bible lays bare the lie of overcoming the monster: we do not do so via violence or power. We do so by the stubborn insistence another reality and power is at work.

Wrath, in this story, is worked out in prayer, lament, longing, and an iron-willed hope. And phrases like “you are alone” dissolve. This phrase is never really true.

Today or tomorrow—sometime soon—you will see a story that is about overcoming a monster. It will be rooted in fear and appeal to some sort of anger and power. It will likely label another group of people as the “monster.” It may even subtly tell you how you’re the underdog against all odds, often working alone.

But if that first century Jewish man is right—if he’s not crazy or a liar—the monster story both can be and ought to be reframed. The monster is overcome by working for the good of the community. By prayer and lament. By pointing to a deeper reality. By a man from a backwater in Palestine a couple millennia ago who makes and models another way.