How to Write a Story Like Fried Green Tomatoes?
Written by Julia Guillermina
Do you wish you were the author of your favourite book or movie? Then you start writing, wanting to share your own stories, the stories dear to you – yourself and your dreams and your memories, the old stories your grandma told you, the ones that made you cry. But somehow, that book or movie is better than your first drafts… how did it achieve that?
I am going to analyse my own favourite movie, Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), because it is a grandma’s story that makes the audience cry. Watch it before reading this post: it is full of spoilers and lacks a good summary. For those who’ve watched it, let me remind you…
There are two timelines in this movie: the present one, where a middle-aged woman meets an old woman in a care home, and the past one, which consists of the old woman’s memories. The past timeline seems like the real story: a murder mystery in Alabama, where a white woman and a Black man are accused of the murder of a member of the KKK.
I’ve tried to make the most boring summary ever, because I want to say this: you can take any story, no matter how boring it is, and make your readers love it. You just need to catch their attention and make them stay.
How does this movie hook the audience? It starts with an old car being put out of the mud. The credits are written over the rails of a train, and why should you care about these images? Then you see the dull Couch couple. This, along with that weird title, Fried Green Tomatoes, does not seem like the beginning of an amazing movie. Kathy Bates’ face three minutes in is the audience’s face: I’m bored, life is heavy, I want a chocolate bar.
Is this movie and the life of this woman, Evelyn Couch, worth the 2 hours? Not sure, even when Evelyn Couch meets Ninny Threadgoode, the woman who’s going to change her life. But here is the uneventful moment when magic sparks. Here, the movie really begins: it only happens because these two women meet.
Ninny catches Evelyn’s attention, just as the movie catches the audience’s interest, when she speaks of murder.
“But how anybody could have thought she murdered that man is beyond me.” Minute 7:02.
Evelyn and the audience are all at a loss: “I beg your pardon?” Can you repeat that? Did I misjudge this old lady? Did I misjudge the movie? Yeah, you did. It was prepared all along by playing with your prejudices.
And this movie uses a lot of characters that an audience is prejudiced against. Not a hot guy on the horizon. Middle-aged fat lady and her baseball fan fat husband, old babbling crazy lady. We’ve seen a car and a train, but we still don’t know that those elements of the transport revolution are going to make us cry. Yes. Cry. All these emotions are thanks to people who are supposedly not interesting.
First, Ninny Threadgoode, the 80-year-old woman who doesn’t have anything left in her life but her stories, the old stories your grandma told you, the ones that make you cry and that you want to share in your next bestseller. She is portrayed as weird, but you come to love her so much that when you think she dies, you’re really upset. Just like Evelyn, who still represents the audience.
She’s the second one, Evelyn Couch. The menopausal woman who is lost in her life, who isn’t young anymore, who isn’t a mother anymore, since her son has gone, she doesn’t even feel like a wife! Just a cook and a bad co-pilot. But Evelyn (let’s never forget she is the audience) can still be a hero, menopause be damned.
This is, for me, the heart of this movie. The main story isn’t the one about the murder. It’s the one about ageing. What do women do when they don’t fit society’s expectations anymore? They live out of stories. They tell and listen. And what Ninny is telling Evelyn is not just a tale. It’s a message: there were always misfits in society, no matter the society. But they can be happy too.
In Ninny’s story, Idgie is the main misfit: she can’t be bothered to follow the Church’s leading, she befriends Black people, she doesn’t marry, she lives with a woman. But everyone around her can also be considered a misfit: Ruth leaving her husband, Buddy Jr. without his arm, Big George and Sipsey because they’re Black.
To fit, they would have to ignore the same things that their society ignores, themes that become unspeakable: racism, homosexuality, poverty, alcoholism, cannibalism. But they don’t ignore them, even if they don’t have words for what they are experiencing. The audience never hears those words, but they see them. Big George being whipped, Idgie giving that bottle to Smokey, the poor running after the train from which Idgie and Ruth stole food.
Only Sipsey speaks out loud, giving the best quotes of the movie. An old lady again, a describer.
Yet, the main unspeakable theme is homosexuality, because not even the movie makers could talk about that. Nevertheless, words are never the first tool in a movie. Image is. You can watch Fried Green Tomatoes and not see Idgie and Ruth as lovers, and then you can visit any internet page where they put the right images next to each other and your whole world flips.
How to do that with words? Movies are a good inspiration for novels, because, if they are deliberate enough, they show instead of telling. And “show don’t tell” is the main advice when writing. Don’t tell me your life. Don’t bother me with yourself and your dreams and your memories and with whatever makes you cry. Don’t explain to me why I should like your book. Make me.
Make me like your story, make me cry, make me remember, make me dream as if you were speaking about me. Make me laugh, like Sipsey does. Make me love Ruth and cry for her death. Make me root for Evelyn, who’s the mirror of myself. You know you’re living the story when the second train hits the second Buddy and you’re afraid he’s dead.
This is hard to achieve, but there are ways. Simplicity is the first one. Don’t be afraid of flat characters: making them round already takes the whole movie. The fat lady becomes Evelyn, the old woman is Ninny (or is she?), you can even take a liking to the baseball fan of a husband, Ed.
Let’s summarise the movie again: Evelyn meets Ninny who tells her a story so fantastic they become friends. That’s simple enough. This is the main plot, which only goes forward because of the anecdotes from the past. Evelyn feels bad, and Ninny introduces her to Idgie. Evelyn still feels bad and Ninny introduces her to Ruth. Then, Evelyn feels kind of bad and Ninny introduces her to the Whistle Stop Café Idgie and Ruth opened. There, Evelyn finds hope and starts changing. She comes back for more, and that’s why Ninny has to finish the story: kill Frank Bennet like he was killed, kill Ruth like she died, kill the Café… But she doesn’t kill Idgie, and the question mark at the end is hope rising, still there, for the future that’s to come, even if it’s surrounded by death.
In the end, the murder mystery is not important anymore. You just want more Idgie, more Ruth, more Buddy’s stories, more time with Ninny. Here are the characters your reader’s going to love, and they’re only one version of your lost grandma.
Fried Green Tomatoes is written with emotions. Simple emotions like fear, love, and loss. It manipulates its audience, using what the average watcher takes for granted and changing their perspective. You can do that and make them laugh; you can do that and make them cry. In the end, the movie is a performance, it’s a good lie.
So what I take from it is that writing means preparing the performance your story is going to be when it’s read. You don’t tell your life, you trick the reader into thinking they just listened to a tale, when in fact they were forced to follow a neatly prepared path.
My next step in my writing career should then be: learn to lie, study theatre.