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After giving listeners the ten-thousand-foot view of the Impossible Man book project and Jon’s story in Episode One, Episode Two begins the more-or-less-chronological exploration of Jon’s “character arc” as described by me, Johnny: a fiction-minded storyteller.
Wondering what the hell that means? Enter your email below to get a cheat sheet of the process used to uncover Jon’s “character arc.”
In this episode you’ll hear about Jon’s earliest years, when he began kindergarten and was mocked by the other children because he didn’t know what “handicapped” meant — something his mother explained very differently than most people do. The way Jon responded to those taunts might surprise you.
As with the pilot, please let us know if this project is interesting to you and if we should continue! Ratings and reviews on podcast directories (like iTunes and Google Podcasts) are very appreciated and will help us a lot!
TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:
NOTE: The transcript below was generated by AI and has not been edited. Accordingly, some things below are a little weird … but you’re smart, so I’m confident you can figure it out.
SPEAKER A
When you're on a table in a hospital and the doctor tells you you're going to die, there are only tworesponses. The first response is to get very afraid and then die. Second response is fuck you. I wasn'tready to die, so the fuck you response was all that was left to me.
SPEAKER B
Welcome to The Impossible Man, the true story of how the inability to move allowed one person to tradehis humanity for ODS defying superpowers and how he clawed his way back. Hi, and welcome to episodetwo of The Impossible Man. I am your host, Johnny B. Truant. Thanks to everyone who got in touch afterthe pilot. Clearly a lot of you out there interested, so we're going to continue. We're going to see whathappens over another few episodes. If you are still into it, be sure to let us know. The first episode of thepodcast was meant to be a complete overview of John's story and the podcast idea and the project thatwe're doing. And as such, we covered a lot of ground. We covered kind of John's general introduction, mygeneral introduction, the project's introduction, as well as a lot of his attitudes and beliefs and the idea ofthis impossibility that he has cultivated. Now, when I followed up with John to do episode two, I wanted tobe a little bit more organized, a little bit more linear. And as you heard in the previous show, I'm a fictionwriter. So I'm looking at this story as if it were a fictional story, as if John were a character. And so Imapped out the markers that would appear in a story if John were fictional. And I'm beginning to exploresome of those in this episode. Every character, before they go on their journey, begins in an ordinaryworld. And so that's a lot of what we covered in. This is what was in John's early life. What were hisattitudes when he was born? What were the dispositions of his parents, and what were the influencesthere? And how did that propel him forward into the beginning of his arc where he originally had someemotion and then learned that he had to turn it off in order to protect himself? And that is the larger arcthat we're going to continue on. And I have in mind what his inciting incident, his first act climax and allthat good stuff is, but we're going to tackle them all in order. So in this one, we really go deep and you'llsee the beginnings of how this unstoppability was forged and how John propelled himself forward andeventually got himself in some trouble that will spend the entire book trying to get himself out of. Andinterestingly, it has nothing to do with his disease, at least not as the main show. So here we arecontinuing our discussion with episode two of The Impossible Man. All right, here we are back for sessiontwo. I guess we're calling this podcast the Impossible Man. That's an evolution. We didn't know that thefirst time. Are you happy with that?
SPEAKER A
I am, yeah. I may be unhappy with later, but I reserve the right to be unhappy later. But for now, I am.
SPEAKER B
You do well. But I think it works as a good reminder because we've been focusing on your arc, and that isobviously the point of the book. But we to some degree lost track of the point that the whole idea wasthat we're also going to try and teach people how to do this. I asked you on the one we didn't record, theone we didn't share on the podcast, and I said, Is that something you can teach? You can teach peoplehow to do impossible things. And you said yes.
SPEAKER A
Yeah, absolutely. I was even thinking, when this eventually becomes a book, maybe that'll become anaddendum that no one gets on the podcast. What do you think of that idea.
SPEAKER B
How to do impossible things so they have to get the book. You can't just cheap out.
SPEAKER A
Yeah, I'll write you'll be able to pick it up if you're listening closely enough. But I can add a little manual,field manual to doing impossible things.
SPEAKER B
I like this. That's the content marketer in both of us right there. That's what that is. All right. So what I didis in between these, because last time was kind of an overview. We were all over the place. We coveredkind of your mentality and your history and all that. But I think it might make sense with if we takediversions, that's fine. But as a general through line to begin kind of telling the story in chronological order.So I wrote down on my little cheat sheet here what I believe to be the act markers in your story. The waythat I'm approaching this as the person who's going to be putting down the actual words is to suss out acharacter arc as if you were a fictional hero. So if you were a protagonist in a book, there are certainpoints that you would go through. You would begin in your ordinary world. You would have an incitingincident that kind of kicked you out of normal and taught you that something was needed attention. Youwould have the first act climax where you're going on a journey. You would have a midpoint whereeverything changes. That's the hallmark of the midpoint. You would have a dark knight of the soul, whichspoiler, we kind of already know what the Dark Knight of the Soul is probably going to be a second actclimax where you're all in on this new information, this change that you're going to realize in your arc andfinally resolution. And so I wrote down what I think are the act markers. And the arc that we decided wewere going to use was this idea of you were always confident, but in order to have that confidence, youwere angry and emotionless, in your words. Was that accurate?
SPEAKER A
Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER B
So you kind of said, Get out of my way, world. I'll show you who I am. I'll show you what I can do. But itcost you empathy and personal relationships.
SPEAKER A
I was a machine.
SPEAKER B
What I had here, maybe we just kind of start with because I've never done this before in a podcast. So Iguess with the ordinary world, I'm imagining you. So this is what I'm imagining. I'm imagining young John. Imean, we have to start from the beginning, right? And so tell me the story as well as you can from thebeginning. Now, one of the things we need to keep in mind as we do this is that at the beginning, yourmom was obiwan, right? She was the mentor. She was the one where you got your unstoppable,unbreakable sort of an attitude. So I imagine a lot of this is going to be her story, but where would you liketo begin? Where does the John Morrow story begin?
SPEAKER A
I mean, it might be interesting to know that when I was a young child, I was not emotionless. And you canactually see it in the photography from when I was a kid, when I was, say, before I had my back surgery, Iwas your average, normal, happy go lucky kid. And then somewhere along the way, I think it was my backsurgery, the way my eyes looked completely changed. They became more dead, more distant, andthey've never really even now regained the same …
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