On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, author Kathleen McCleary offered suggestions on how to weave joy and sadness into our stories. Here’s an excerpt from that post:
Every good story has to include both joy and sadness, but it’s the challenges, the losses, the disappointments, that make the most interesting reading, as Tolstoy pointed out. (“Every happy family is alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”) So if my suggestions here focus more on the dark side than the light, it’s because, for better or worse, that’s what drives good fiction. Consider:
The flip side of joy. Your character may be experiencing a moment of profound joy—a wedding, a coronation, the birth of a child, a retirement celebration. What else is going on? Major life milestones often involve loss as well as celebration—the loss of freedom or the road not taken or the hope for a different ending. And I don’t mean a character having reservations about a major life event (is this really the person I should marry?) as much as I mean a character’s experience of conflicting emotions at the same time (I love this person and am thrilled to be getting married, AND I want to howl with grief because my beloved father is not here).
Who or what is your character grieving? We don’t only grieve for the people we lose. We grieve the experiences we never had and maybe never will have. We grieve scenarios or lives we imagined for ourselves that suddenly bump into a reality that makes it clear those imagined lives will never happen. We grieve our own lost physical abilities or good looks or health. We grieve the loss of routines, the loss of place, the loss of the familiar. The first house I owned was next door to a five-acre forest, filled with towering Douglas Firs and hemlock and cedar trees, as well as dogwood, maples, and more. One year a developer bought that parcel of land and cut down every last tree, and believe me, I grieved the loss of those trees every time I looked out the window or stepped outside. Even in the midst of happy times, we can be suddenly rocketed back into feelings of loss.
How does your character experience joy and grief? Intense emotions are intensely personal Characters may react differently to happy events—the wedding that delights your protagonist may fill her sister with sadness, while the birth of a child may terrify a grandparent who once lost a child of their own. Similarly, if you and someone else are grieving the loss of a person dear to you both, your experiences of that person are different, and the ways you feel that loss will be different. Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet (now a movie) includes one of the most vivid, searing depictions of grief I’ve ever read. The different ways the characters grieve almost splits them apart, until one of the characters is able to see and feel the way the other has poured their grief into a different outlet, and come to a new understanding.
How will your character’s grief be revealed. over the arc of your story? Grief is an upheaval; it can lead to divorce, estrangement, reconciliation, passion. I recently finished reading The Correspondent, Virginia Evan’s surprise bestseller, which deals with a character’s intense sorrow over the loss of a child (this is not a spoiler; it’s part of the book throughout). But it’s only as the character grows and changes over the course of the book that she can fully come to terms with the real source of her sadness, and the ending is a surprise.
Joanne Guidoccio 