Mar 16, 2022
How to build a story arc, and then ruin it. It's a cautionary tale, my friends.
“Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon:
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The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage.
[00:00:00] Last week, we talked about character arcs, especially transformation arcs, and how we need to keep the essence of the character still intact, even though they are making different decisions. And today we are going to talk about how to ruin all of that just by the reaction or how the other characters in the story behave.
[00:00:24] Today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello. And welcome to today's episode of Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy who writes and talks about writing. The whole point of this podcast is to get you to write a novel in 18 months and to have the wisdom to adjust that timeline, if you need to. So today we are talking about character arcs again. Last week, we talked about how to make a good character arc, how you need to preserve the essence of that character.
[00:01:20] And reflect that while they are still making better decisions or worse decisions, depending on the direction the arc is going. And today we are going to talk about how to ruin all of that based on the reaction of the other characters in the story. So I told you last week that I have been reading the book of Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders.
[00:01:42] And this book is one of the best references on developmental edits. It is the deep developmental edit. It is meat as opposed to milk. He takes the very underlying, the really deep, the really thoughtful, amazing parts of a story and brings it out and shows you how it worked or how it didn't work.
[00:02:05] And it is astounding. It is incredible how he is so in touch with his craft and so in touch with the way that storytelling happens, that he can simply share with you how to do it better by breaking apart seven classical Russian short stories. In the one that we focused on most recently, it's the story of a man who sacrifices himself to save another man while they are trapped in a blizzard.
[00:02:36] And because of his sacrifice, this other man survives while he dies, he perishes in the blizzard. This is where we take this wonderful transformation of this selfish ornery man who is focused on himself, who loves money and whatever. And we take him through this cool arc of self-discovery sort of, and better choices in order to sacrifice himself to save this other character.
[00:03:04] And we love that. And it is cool to see that demonstrated in this short story. However, then we have this other character who is saved, who is written in more of a two dimensional way and who represents kind of this idealistic arc type of a surf, like just kind of the idea that the working man is the best man that a simple man is the good man that we all need to aspire to become.
[00:03:36] And it's interesting because in the rest of the story, this man does not reflect on that sacrifice. That sacrifice is not brought up again, it doesn't stir up things within him and it doesn't inspire him to live his life in a different way. The sacrifice happens, this guy survives and the savior like this other guy--the guy who saved him-- is largely forgotten in the rest of the story. It's a moment where you kind of get to sit back and wonder what happened. And so we can question the story arc of the one character of the savior and ask, why did we even do that? And we can question, why do we have this simpleton who just got saved and it didn't seem to matter to him. So why does it matter to me and why did it matter to the author or does it? And just in doing that, it cheapens the experience of the savior, of the guy who sacrificed himself to save this other guy from a blizzard. I once read a story, just to demonstrate this point, I read a story. It was kind of like portal fantasy, I guess. So the guy found himself in a new and a strange world with magic, and there were some differences in his body just because in the real world he had a specific sickness that made his body function poorly. He couldn't feel things. He had a hard time just living a normal life and suddenly he wakes up in this magical world and that condition doesn't exist here.
[00:05:19] So he has this strong body. He can make these really cool things happen. And he is feeling things again, unlike he has felt them in a long time. with that in mind, this is what happens. And in this story, this is pretty gross anyway, but it was more confusing with the way that it was handled.
[00:05:41] So toward the beginning of this story, this middle aged man befriend. Or something is discovered by this woman in her late teens, early twenties, I believe was her age and she's beautiful and she's attractive. And he now has this body with new found senses that he has not lived with in a very long time.
[00:06:03] So a new discovery of this vigor and this attraction to this woman anyway, there comes about a sexual assault and it happens by the main character, which I cannot handle reading anyway. But. The thing that happens later or immediately after, and then throughout the book. So in my mind, sexual assault is very important. It is always a very big pivotal moment in a story, and it needs to be treated with sensitivity and it needs to be given very sensitive. Proper attention in order to make sense that we are including such violence and such horror in our stories like sexual assault needs to be there for a reason.
[00:06:55] And it needs to be a damn good reason. With this story there was the sexual assault, it was done by the main character, which is already a hard thing to figure out why that happened. And then this young woman kind of disappears for the rest of the novel. And her mother immediately comes into the story and serves as the guide to this man to get him to his destination.
[00:07:25] Now if we're talking about choices and dealing with things and cheapening experiences and making things unbelievable. In my mind, if a person just had a violent sexual encounter with a woman and then is now forced to be in the company of that woman's mom for kind of a long time and to have to trust her and to have to like, trust his safety with her and trust that she's going to like lead him to where he needs to go and whatever else.
[00:07:59] There would be certain internal monologue going on. There would be a certain mannerisms. There would be paranoia. There would be something, there would be a reaction to that strange and awful situation. In this story that didn't happen at all. This mom came in and the sexual assault was never mentioned again.
[00:08:25] The mom came in and led this man to his destination. And she was actually with him throughout kind of a big chunk of the book. And then the book ends and we have no idea why the sexual assault was even in there to begin with why it needed to come about that way. Why a rediscovery of this body that could feel and lust and
[00:08:50] perform and whatever else needed to be explored and rediscovered in such a violent way. There were so many questions left unanswered, and because of all of that, instead of me hating the character, I mean, I wasn't terribly fond of the character anyway. What it instead made me do is question the author.
[00:09:17] Like why, why, why was this the way that we did it? So I read this book back in college and one of my best friends at the time also read the book. I recommended it to her. Not because it was good, but because it was bad. And we spent an entire evening in village in eating pie and ripping up hard. This book, I'm not going to mention it, what the title of this book is, So much of the believability of the story stemmed from that choice of inviting this horrendous, active violence into the story, and then responding in no way at all to that act throughout the rest of the story. And as a result of that, it cheapened the story and it made. I believe the main character less and it made us not too interested in the author from then on, that is how. We take these really big moments and it can be a big achievement. It can be a big act of violence. It can be good. It can be bad. It can be a great many things. That's how we take it. And we ruin it by letting it fall flat with the other characters in the story or with the main character itself.
[00:10:37] Let's remember the gravity of the choices that we put our characters through. Let's remember everybody's reaction to the things that they are exposed to and let all of that to build your story. When you include everything. If this horrendous act of violence had been fleshed out and there had been attention brought to this character's thought process or an encounter by the mother or anything, if anything at all had come about.
[00:11:06] the entire story would have been better Revisiting the short story that George Saunders analyzes in a swim in a pond in the rain. If the simpleton who was saved had allowed that sacrifice to change his life and make him a better person, the sacrifice itself would have been so much more meaningful and it would have been better, but because none of that happened, the sacrifice ended up feeling ch.
[00:11:35] Be sure to tune in next week with another episode of Writing in the Tiny House. Thank you so much for your time. Have a good day.
[00:11:45]
[00:11:45] And that is it for today. Just a reminder that "Brigitte,"Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible and Apple Books as an audio book. And I provide advanced reader copies of these short stories as I release them to my patrons. So become a patron today by visiting patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse to support both my writing and this podcast. And lastly, be sure to follow me on social media. My Instagram is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is@authordevind. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today and have fun writing. We will see you next time.