Your personal point of commitment to a story you’re reading
comes when a character of some interest to you takes a fateful step toward a
goal. The character puts thought into
action, desire and yearning into motion.
This equation allows you to measure your own sense of
involvement against demonstrable interest—any kind of interest—coming from a
character. You do not of necessity have
to admire or even like the character.
You may, in fact, root for a character to fail, at which point he or she
may realize something to the extent of satisfying your sense of dramatic
closure.
You are in effect comparing your reaction to the situation
to the character’s involvement in the story.
You want to be at least equal to
the character’s interest; otherwise you’re likely to put the book down without
picking it up again.
The operant concept here is the character’s understanding of
a truth or of Reality. This is so
because at present your purpose in writing is to lead yourself (yourselves) to
discovery. You do not have to enjoy or
even like what you discover. You consider the process of discovery of something
unsettling or even repugnant as a basis for story. A character discovers some uncomfortable
truth, then sets forth to cope with it, meeting opposition and reversal on the
way.
So far as involvement is concerned, you as reader or writer
feel some emotional connection with the character setting off on the venture of
coping. If you cannot feel that
character’s emotional connection with the discovery and subsequent response to
it, you are lost as reader, lost as writer.
An essential ingredient in this business of commitment is
time. All characters earn their way into
a story by nature of wanting something.
Major characters move up to the level of being major because they want
what they want now.
They’ve tried being patient, but patience removes a
character from being pulled into the sinkhole that story must in time become if
it is to remain story and not mere recitation of event without throughline.
See, you said time was of the essence.
The clock is ticking.
The grace period is running down the drain.
Time is up.
Characters with patience are characters in control. Wile E. Coyote is front rank. Imagine Wile E. Coyote being patient. Wile E. Coyote is the ambassador of
impatience. Wile E. Coyote is desperate.
The desperation he suffers is in direct proportion to his lack of
patience. The degree of humiliation
awaiting him is indirect proportion to his lack of patience.
You see how it works, don’t you? A character who is trying
to be patient is immediately vulnerable.
A character who is patient is a character who is in control. True enough, we, as readers, want to see someone
in control lose that control in the Wile E. Coyote sense of losing it to the
extent of being humiliated. Again.
And again.
The formula for a character:
Who is this person? What does
this person want it? Why does this
person want “it” now? What will this
person do to achieve “it”? And then,
what happens to this character after achieving the “it”?
And there you are as
writer. You are impatient for discovery,
pushing character toward the destabilizing event of the discovery that sets
story in motion so that you can launch into a response, Wile E. Coyote to the
rescue.
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