The flip side is critical for antagonists, too. Yet he has an innocence, a kindness, and a sweetness that make him unforgettable, and that lead those around him to act in remarkable ways. He’s soft-spoken, innocuous, not memorable. You can find this duality in Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Less, featuring a mild-mannered, polite, not very successful middle-aged protagonist who seems to let life sweep him up in its currents and carry him along. Maybe she can’t empathize with her husband or brother or the child who feel things more intensely than she does, so her relationships are distant, a step removed from real intimacy. But there’s a flip side to all that stability, too. Maybe your character is a young woman who’s calm and emotionally balanced and poised under pressure, the rock of her family. And it’s the key to story, because every compelling story involves a win and a loss.Īs you write, think about the flip side of your character and your story. It’s the key to plot, because every obstacle offers an opportunity to conquer that obstacle, to face down a challenge or a fear. It’s the key to character, because every character is both good and bad. How a parent’s death frees us to BE someone different is yet another piece of the story.Īnd this proverbial two-edged sword-we lose, we gain-is at the heart of writing fiction. Those are just the obvious, external examples. We can serve tapas on Christmas eve instead of roast beef, move to a different house or different town or different job or different relationship, take up the hobby Dad thought was a waste of time and money, go on the trip Mom worried was too risky. We are different people without our parents, no matter how young or old we are when we lose them. Suddenly we are free to be and do things completely apart from our parents’ expectations or rules or hopes or disappointments. We lose the buffer between ourselves and our own mortality we lose a generation and the values and events and memory that shaped them we lose the individual who shaped us, for better or for worse.īut it’s also liberating. While parent/child relationships are often complicated (my God, what would we all write about if human relationships were straightforward and easy?), the death of a parent brings enormous loss. “Is that an awful thing to say?” The answer is no, because it’s true. “But it’s also liberating,” my friend said. Losing a parent-especially the only parent you had left-sends the world spinning off its axis. Recently I was talking to a friend about her mother’s death.
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