Joel’s Improved Personal Website
We Will Haunt and Hunt Our Own Creations
Listen to this smattering of writing advice from the book No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty:
“Pick out a character that’s causing you no end of grief, and do something reckless with them. Have them exiled out of the story or get swallowed by a wormhole while waiting for a bus. If you’ve hit a standstill in your efforts to bring two obviously perfect romantic leads together, kill one of them. Your readers won’t see it coming, and in figuring out how to fix the mess you’ve just made of your story, you’ll give your imagination the fertile improvisational environment it needs to thrive.”
What we have here, in miniature, is the ‘problem of pain’ made simple. When we take up our pens to write our own stories, a god-like quality shows through. What so many people deride in God as unjust – his willingness to allow, or even (dare I say it) to introduce pain and suffering – they blithely and even jokingly accept as best practice in the stories they write for their own fame and enjoyment.
Here’s another example. In author Janet Fitch’s recent Top 10 Rules for Writers in the LA Times, her tenth tip is:
10. Torture Your Protagonist
“The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.”
When we write the story, we sit in the seat of God, and our understanding of God betrays itself too well. We will haunt and hunt our own creations to the limits of their lives, and set lions on them to spur them running in fear the last mile to victory – our stories would not be worth telling if we didn’t. But not God. Surely not God.
This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
Music cues are Neptune, the Mystic from Holst’s The Planets, and The Pines of the Appian Way from The Pines of Rome by Respighi.)
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)