Jennifer Crusie | Argh Ink | Blog

Sarah Palin resigned from her governorship about six hours ago, effectively dumping the news in the dead zone of Friday night before the fourth of July. I will leave it to others to determine the political implications of that; what fascinates me is the speculation her announcement is generating. Because as everybody is saying, there’s got to be more story there.

I believe that as human beings, we need story. We crave it. We take the random events of the day and arrange them into a pleasing narrative so that the day makes sense as a whole. We take isolated incidents and embroider them with commentary and invest them with meaning and they too become stories with clear themes. But it isn’t just that we need events to make sense; we need them to satisfy our hunger for drama, for surprise and reversal and climax. A story isn’t enough, it has to be a good story.

So Sarah Palin resigns as governor and the reader expectation begins, the speculation for what’s really happening, for the how the story is going to end. Thinking Sarah Palin’s story is ever going to end is a fool’s game; you couldn’t put that woman down with a stake through the heart. But how this episode in her life is going to play out, that’s the stuff of great drama.

Take character. I watched the press conference with a friend who said, “She’s furious.” And that’s what she looked like to me, too: so angry that her smile was set in concrete, her words spit out between those lipsticked pit-bull lips. But I read other people who said she sounded tearful, still others who said she sounded confident and positive. Any writer knows that the reader’s take on your protagonist makes or breaks your story, so think of us all as different readers, some of whom see her as ruthlessly ambitious and who therefore see anger as something forces her out of office, others who see her as a persecuted heroine and who therefore see distress because she’s being forced to give up something she loves to save her family, and still others who see her as a true voice in a dark time and who therefore see bravery as she leaves a prestigious office because she can better serve in other ways. Never underestimate the power of a reader who wants a certain kind of story. She’ll write it right over whatever is on the page or screen.

And in this case, nobody really knows what was on that screen, so the reader can really dig in. I’m a firm believer in white space in a story, giving the reader enough room to make the story her own without hijacking it completely so that the end result is a collaboration between audience and storyteller. The story Palin told tried to control the white space–she was leaving because her family wanted her to, she was leaving for the good of the people of Alaska, she was leaving because she had more important work outside the political structure–but the problem with all those narratives is that they cancelled each other out. You need one main story line and then some subplots, not several storylines thrown out hoping one of them sticks. When that happens, you sound like you’re not in control of your narrative which is when the reader is forced to take over: you didn’t focus the story so she’ll have to.

That’s where the speculation comes in, and that speculation is what I find so fascinating from a story-telling viewpoint. One storyline speaks to people’s need to see relationships between narratives, to see a Big Picture at work. That’s the one where Palin is one of Gov. Sanford’s other women. It’s pretty ludicrous, but it does pull an insane week together and give the increasingly chaotic news cycle some balance. Any editor would approve of weaving those threads together, it’s just reality that snorts and moves on to the next theory.

That theory speaks to people’s need to love Palin as a heroine, and it says that she’s got a master plan here and that this will turn out to be a brilliant political move. As a story, that’s another good approach: the underdog who does something that the entire world laughs at or condemns and who then turns out to be crazy like a fox, showing everybody who’s the real winner, a just reward for a risk-taker who rejects conventional thinking, Sarah Palin as Susan Boyle. Every political commentator I’ve heard, both Republican and Democrat, has said, “She’s toast,” but she’s been toast before and popped up again. So this story is by no means as far out as hiking the Appalachian Trail with Sanford.

Then there are the lovers of mystery and tragedy, those who see her as suffering from hubris, riding for a fall. Those are the ones who saw anger in her speech and who are waiting for the next revelation, the bombshell that forced her into resigning so that she could leave office on her own terms instead of being thrown out, the rumblings about criminal proceedings and possibly the IRS. That’s pure schadenfreude, and it derives, I think, from our deep enjoyment of righteous indignation and craving for justice as we think it should be served. If Palin’s campaign made you loathe her, then you’re rooting for a criminal indictment next week.

But the best story may be one of the ones Palin told herself, the one about the smart, brave, modest point guard who throws the ball to someone else for the good of the team. If that one sticks, she’s a heroine no matter what the full-court press reveals about her in the days to come. It’s a good story, probably the story she should have concentrated on instead of the anthology of reasons she rambled through in her seventeen-minute Friday night epic, and I think it probably speaks for the way Palin sees herself right now. As I said, the protagonist is everything in storytelling, and Palin has pretty clearly always told herself a story with a great protagonist. All she has to do is sell that story to her readership at large, and she’s made herself bullet-proof.

I have no idea what’s going on up in Alaska, but I know that the stories people are spinning from the opening Palin gave them are probably more satisfying than anything reality will deliver because they’re the stories that people want to hear. Still, I’m going to be glued to my TV next week, with Rachel and Jon because I trust them to deliver my kind of narrative. Sarah Palin started a hell of a tale today. I can’t wait to see how it ends.