The following is an excerpt from The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual:
Has anyone ever told you, “plot grows out of character”? Well, I happen to know they have. I’ve said it.
But what do we mean?
We mean: character is the alpha and omega of fiction. And characters are only important to readers insofar as they need things. Things that contrast. Things that conflict. When someone seriously, desperately, aggressively needs two mutually-exclusive things, well, stuff tends to happen to them. Big, exciting stuff! That’s the fabulous stuff of fiction.
One afternoon on Twitter I started a conversation I called, for no particular reason, #editingchat. A few readers and I conducted a little experiment in which we demonstrated Developmental Editing on an unwritten story. I said, “Someone give me a story in a sentence,” and someone gave us three aspects of a story: a death, a birth, and a mission, the protagonist a woman.
So I said, “What does this woman need?” And I opened it up to everyone—we were just horsing around.
It turned out what this woman needs is forgiveness for a death due to the mission, specifically the death of the father of her baby. Somehow, she’s done something that makes her think she’s guilty, that she needs to stick with the mission in order to redeem his death, to prove to herself and others he has not died in vain. To earn forgiveness.
Then I said, “What else does she need? What prevents her from completely fulfilling her original need right now?”
And it turned out she also needs to survive—in particular she needs her baby to survive.
So we talked for a long time about what kind of situation could force that woman to choose between earning forgiveness and protecting her baby. We got a lot of talk about what choice she should make—to give up seeking forgiveness outside herself, to realize her beloved died for her sake, to learn she can only get true forgiveness from herself.
“You are some optimistic little chipmunks, aren’t you?” I said. “You really want to skip the Climax and get straight to that Resolution, don’t you?”
In this way we learned what motivates a reader to read an entire story: wanting to know the Resolution.
But we don’t know the Resolution before we finish writing our story. What we needed to discover first was the Climax.
So we went back to it: what situation could force this woman to choose between her loyalty to her dead beloved—that fierce need to redeem his death, to earn forgiveness for what she cannot undo—and her instinct to protect her baby.
“What if the baby were in danger?” the writer suggested.
Well, that’s a pretty good headlock to get that protagonist in! She’s working on this mission that means everything in the world to her, but suddenly her baby’s in danger and she has to choose between continuing her mission and saving her baby’s life.
And that’s when we learned that needs must reside not only in the protagonist (and their writer), but, most essentially, inside the reader.
Because readers all know you have to save your baby’s life! That’s a #1 top priority instilled in nearly all of us at a very early age. Those of us who don’t have it. . .well, we don’t generally write very good fiction. We can’t empathize with humanity in general, and empathy is one of those things a writer must have in spades.
So if we just make this protagonist choose between saving her baby and continuing her so-far hopeless pursuit of forgiveness through a mission that may or may not mean much to the reader, the reader’s going to close the book with a satisfying snap and say, “All done! Conflict resolved.”
This is the great, vast luxury of fiction. Because creating a need for forgiveness in our reader as powerful as their need to save babies’ lives is what this story is all about.
Write it—the story of how this one character, this realistic, three-dimensional, internally-conflicted woman, becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in this mission, with her dreadful, transcendental need to prove her beloved did not die in vain. Give her a series of catastrophes as the mission progresses, earthshaking developments to put the reader on the edge of their chair. Make her engagement with this mission, her pursuit of forgiveness, as detailed and real and vivid as humanly possible.
At the same time, bring in the baby, but keep it secondary to the main plot (undercut the reader’s natural investment in saving babies). Let her pregnancy be a subplot running through the story of the mission. Let her get pregnant (or discover her pregnancy), let her suffer a major setback in her pregnancy, let her give birth under terrible, almost deadly circumstances, and then, for a short time at least, let her believe everything’s finally going to be all right. She made it. She’s almost there, with both forgiveness and child safe. That’s the Faux Resolution.
Then when you put the baby in danger and bring the woman all the way to the brink of her nightmare, where she must choose between forgiveness and child, you’ve got your reader exactly where your protagonist is: trapped between inescapable choices, forced to face themself in their darkest and, maybe, brightest hour, tormented by the sheer reality of existence.
Which is where epiphany lies.