This exercise is deceptively simple. The key to solving this puzzle is to really empathize with the hero and feel the hero’s feelings.
What is the story?
Hint
There are three potential heroic entities in this story. Visualize the scene and consider where each of the entities starts and finishes. When you feel sad, you’re on the right track.
Answer
The hero is the rock. More specifically, it is a lonely rock. The rock’s goal is to connect and interact with people. The obstacle is that the rock is at the bottom of the lake. Forever.
The meme doesn’t say that the boy throws the rock into the lake. However, in a story, every detail matters. As the famous playwright Anton Chekhov said, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don’t put it there.”
At the end of the meme, the rock seems happy, remembering the best day it has ever had. What makes the meme compelling is that this is a story of a lonely being, consoling itself with a memory, while it lives in isolation. That story lives below the surface in accordance with the principle of depth.
You could argue that the rock, as an inanimate being, doesn’t think and feel the way we humans do, and that perhaps it feels fine at the bottom of the lake. However, that doesn’t accord with the givens of the meme – that there exists one favorite moment in thousands of years, and the conditions which led to this moment are extremely unlikely to recur.
It’s also not how storytellers think. Film and TV writing teacher Bill Idelson used to say, “There’s a person walking down the sidewalk on a dark street in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night, and walking right at them from the opposite direction is a huge, disheveled, mean-looking guy. What most people do is cross to the other side of the street. A writer walks right up to the guy and goes to shake his hand.”
Being emotionally courageous, being willing to feel emotional discomfort is a big part of storytelling. Yes, this is just a meme. Just an imaginary rock. However, the loneliness expressed in this poem of a meme is devastating and profound. Your ability to feel that, your empathy, is one of your most important storytelling skills.