In the first two parts of this series, we have seen how Rene Girard’s insights play out in different contexts: Babbitt in Zenith, Huck on the raft, and the three condemned people in No Exit.
So what can writers do to use these insights when they build their own stories? How can memetics provide a process for building a great story?
Here are five principles to consider:
1: Find the Story’s Mediator
Every character wants something. The mimetic question isn’t what they want. The question is: Who showed them to want it? And also: Is this model a potential rival?
In Wanting, a study of Girard’s work, Luke Burgis imagines a community called Celebristan. This is a place where our life models exist apart from everyday life: models, athletes, movie stars, and influencers. You can want what they want without threatening to take it from them, which means you can admire without friction.
Now think about your early days in college: Freshmanistan. Here, the models are nearby. In college, that could include the hot athlete, the brainy student, the rad prof, or the stunning coed. Here, competition can be intense. Competing with a roommate in Freshmanistan is different than admiring a distant star in Celebristan.
Status comes from being extraordinary, not useful. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen describes this as “conspicuous. consumption”: using things to show off. In his day, that could be long fingernails (which indicated no need to work). In our day, it could mean an absurd consumer object, like a Hummer, a heliport, or a custom outdoor kitchen.
Questions for the storyteller: Who is your character’s model? Is the model in Celebristan or Freshmanistan? If Freshmanistan, what happens when both reach for the same thing? And if there are two models — is the character aware of the contradiction they’re living inside?
2: Watch what happens when memetic desire wanes
The hardest move in mimetic plotting isn’t building rivalry. It’s catching the moment when the rivalry’s original object quietly stops mattering.
Part 1 described this: once two rivals are locked in doubling, what’s actually being fought over is no longer the prize but the rival’s gaze — being chosen, being first. The object becomes almost arbitrary, swappable for whatever the rival wants next. When that slide happens, it rarely announces itself with a speech. It shows up in a hesitation, a shift in what a character notices, a new character or idea suddenly receiving the intensity that used to be directed elsewhere. These are the small tells that tell the reader more than the characters know about themselves.
The slide has three distinct causes, and each produces a different story:
Exposure. The model turns out to have clay feet, and the veil tears. This is the oldest pattern in hero worship: the admired figure who gets close enough to be fully seen, and turns out to be ordinary, or worse. The desire doesn’t necessarily die here. What dies is the model’s ability to carry it. The desire migrates — often to a purer, overcorrected version of the same fantasy, because what the imitator was attached to was never the person but the transformation the person seemed to promise. The new model has to promise the same thing more credibly.
Foreclosure. The model stays intact, but the path to the object closes — economically, structurally, sometimes simply generationally. The desire doesn’t migrate to a new model; it finds substitute objects that perform fidelity to the original model’s values on a smaller scale. Michael Kinsley argued this memorably in The New Republic in the 1980s, when the yuppie generation was getting nothing but contempt: have some compassion for them, he wrote, because they can’t have what their parents had — the house, the car, the one-income family — and the expensive wine and the vacations aren’t self-indulgence, they’re tribute. A scaled-down performance of belonging to a value system they still believe in, aimed at an object they can’t reach. George Babbitt is here too: the gadgets, the boosterism, the relentless performing of “player” — a man imitating a model of success that was never quite available to a man of his position to begin with.
Flight. The model simply moves on. Georg Simmel described this with characteristic precision in his 1904 essay “Fashion”: the moment a lower class adopts a style, the upper class abandons it, not because the style has become worse but because it has become common. The model’s desire was never fixed to the object itself — it was fixed to what the object marked, which was distinction. Once the imitator closes the gap, the object stops doing that work, and the model is already chasing whatever still separates them. This produces the hollow arrival: a character who achieves the thing, and finds the thing’s value has already left. They got to the table just as everyone interesting stood up.
The diagnostic question for a writer isn’t which of these is happening. It’s: have you written the moment when you can feel the desire shifting — when a reader watching carefully can see it before the character does?
3: Identify the Boundary
Every storyworld has boundaries. The type of boundary determines how fast the mimetic process runs.
Physical boundaries are porous and slow: people move across them, carry their models with them, establish hybrid cultures on the edges. Professional, religious, and political boundaries are firmer and more self-policing — membership is legible, defection is visible, and the group maintains itself through real consequences for crossing. Virtual boundaries are the fastest and most porous of all, for a reason Sennett couldn’t have named in 1977 but would recognize immediately: in digital communities, the mirroring itself is constant and visible in a way face-to-face mirroring never was. A like is performed agreement. A share is public identification. An absence is already a statement. The cycle that once ran across months of social pressure now runs across hours.
For a storyteller, the practical question isn’t just what kind of boundary your storyworld has. It’s what your storyworld’s boundary is made of — what qualifies someone as inside it, and what exposes them as outside. Forest Hills in 1971 was nominally a physical boundary (a neighborhood), but the community’s internal cohesion was also professional, ethnic, religious. The pressure held from multiple directions at once. What gives a storyworld its texture isn’t any single boundary but the overlapping of several, and the story lives in the places where they don’t quite coincide.
The diagnostic question: what would it cost your character to step even partway out of the mirroring contract their community runs on? Can you price it specifically — in relationships, reputation, livelihood, self-image? If you can’t, the boundary isn’t real enough yet.
4: Decide Who Gets Targeted
Memetic conflict almost always leads to someone getting targeted for blame and ostracism. The question is who, and by what means.
The scapegoat can be overt: expulsion, violence, the full theatrical apparatus of communal punishment. Or it can be Tocqueville’s version — the quiet kind, the withdrawal of regard, the civil death that leaves the body intact and hollows out everything else. The reverend’s gleaming eyes in Babbitt’s last scene are the quiet kind. The Good Citizens’ League turning their backs in Babbitt’s office is the quiet kind. No blood, no spectacle, just the sudden absence of belonging.
The storyteller’s decision here isn’t only who becomes the target — it’s whether they’re a genuine outsider or an insider who stepped back from the mirroring contract. Girard’s point is that the most exposed person in a contagion isn’t necessarily a stranger. It’s often the person who was inside the mesh and tried to exit it — whose non-participation reads as a verdict on everyone who didn’t.
A second decision follows from the first: Does anyone actively manage the targeting? The mechanism exists independently of malice. But once it exists, it’s available to anyone who can correctly identify or manufacture a target and harvest the unity that follows. The story changes considerably depending on whether the community finds its own scapegoat through purely emergent pressure, or whether someone is steering it.
The diagnostic question: at the crisis point of your story, what happens to the person who won’t enter the contagion? Have you written what that refusal costs them, and who notices?
5: Choose the Resolution
Mimetic crises resolve in one of three ways.
- The community finds a scapegoat and discharges its tension, temporarily, at someone’s expense.
- The crisis continues unresolved, with the characters learning to live inside it — which is No Exit’s ending, bleak and honest.
- Outside contact intervenes: real, sustained engagement with someone on the other side of the boundary, the kind that turns elimination into contestation.
This last possibility–which break the spell–is the most interesting. It suggests a way out. That way out is friction and positive conflict.
In The Uses of Disorder, Richard Sennett argues that conflict is the ultimate teacher. When we face conflicts everyday, on a scale we can understand and manage, we develop an ability to navigate the world. When we create barriers to conflict–in gated communities and speech codes–we udnermine our capacity to think and act.
Matthew Crenson confirms this insight in Neighborhood Politics. When residents battle each other every day — zoning, schools, who gets what — they can develop stronger civic bonds.
William Connolly’s agonistic democracy gives this a theoretical name: the antidote to antagonism is better contest, not less contest. You stay in the fight over meaning, over what the community is and who it includes, with someone you may never agree with, while admitting your own deepest commitments are contestable too.
For a storyteller, this is the hardest resolution. Characters can’t hug their way out of genuine mimetic crisis. The contact has to be specific, costly, and sustained enough that the reader believes the stakes of it — believes that the two people across the boundary from each other are actually changed by the encounter, not just softened. Huck can’t reform society but he can tear up the letter. That’s Twain’s version of earned contact: small, irreversible, private, and real.
The diagnostic question: if your story ends in contact and not a scapegoat, what is the exact moment the intervention happens, who pays for it, and how does the reader know it’s real rather than convenient?
Coda: The Try This
In every scene, someone’s approval matters — and that pressure is reshaping what the character wants, how they perform it, and what it would cost them to stop. Track the model, the object, the distance, and the boundary. Watch for the moment the object stops mattering. Know what you’re building to, and what kind of resolution you’re willing to earn.
That’s the whole toolkit. Not a formula. Just a way of seeing more of what’s already there.