“Unveiling Secrets: Jon Gunn Reveals the Hidden Truths Behind Storytelling in SYS Podcast Episode 532!”
Jon Gunn
Yeah, I’m happy to. I’ve done a lot of adaptations and a lot of true stories, actually. So, you know, I always find that the challenge is just boiling down the story to its essence. Like, what is the point of view and what is the story we want to share? And then figuring out with a book like this, which is a true story and has 20 years’ worth of anecdotes, I just sort of pulled all my favorites, you know, and then just looked at it kind of on the table of like, all right, we know we have a love story of a husband and wife. We know they have this child. At what age do we want to spend most of the story, right? For this kid. And I settled on him being a 13-year-old, like the transition for him going into high school seemed like a cool, or to middle school, seemed like a good moment, because it’s just filled with all kinds of, you know, struggles and concerns and funny stories. And so I just basically created a shape of the story that when narrated from the point of view of the child, and that was a big breakthrough for me early on, Austin’s voice is so unique. His worldview is so funny and magical and whimsical that I wanted to let him be the voice of this thing. And then he would tell the story of his parents meeting, falling in love, having him, and that because of the way he thinks, he counts things a lot. And he’s fascinated with the details of things that he would lay out all the different times that he had broken bones in his life because he’s got brittle bone disease. And he would count his parents’ dates and he would count his years and his experiences. And so it gave me a structure that was really useful, that it would be like, all right, this is a man, Scott Loret, who struggles with alcoholism and had really hit rock bottom at a certain point in the story. So I knew that rock bottom was going to be useful for me. And that if you have a book called The Unbreakable Boy about a boy with brittle bone disease and a father who was broken in his own way, then why don’t we shape it around where he broke the most and then tell the story as framed by, here’s the various times in my life when things have broken. And there’s just a lot of thematic ideas that you can imagine, you can look at through that lens of breaking and about that the healing from breaking is what makes us unique and that there’s beauty in the way that we can heal from our brokenness. So, there’s that metaphor of like the broken teacup that when you glue it back together, you paint the seams with gold to celebrate that those things make it special. And so I started with just the title, the concept of a kid with brittle bone, the idea of brokenness and struggling through brokenness and then about how families can help heal us in our brokenness and make us more beautiful on the other side. And it wasn’t difficult to find that with a boy like Austin who had such a positive spirit and such a joyful worldview that to find the idea of gratitude in the midst of struggle was a real, was sort of the gift of the story and that the father could learn that lesson from his son.
