Running in the Dark: Organic Structure for Character-driven stories Part 2 (core events as part of the transformational arc)

I'm always doing a lot of work on core events, the transformational character arc and a bunch of misc. stuff and things that I really think fit into this workshop, and the great thing is that it makes the big puzzle I’m assembling come into focus. If you read my blog, this is part of my post on conscious and subconscious motivation--tweaked for the workshop--which is just another way of describing a layered core event.

As part of retiring this workshop (and putting everything in one spot) I want to keep it with the rest of organic structure so I'm not cutting it out and putting in a link, because I don't see a point to messing up the flow. Core events, like everything that happens in life, have layers and implications. People are people, even if they’re created by someone else—and prefer to think about things that don’t emotionally hurt them. If Mercedes left the front door unlocked, there’s no way she’s going to think, “Oh my God! It’s all my fault,” when there’s a perfectly useful villain around, “It’s all his fault. All the state’s fault. If they hadn’t released the villain from jail…”

Her conscious thoughts and drive would focus on rescuing her sisters because she’s their protector. They love her and she loves them.

Her unconscious motivation would be the sneaking suspicion that she forgot to lock the front door and a huge, horrible load of guilt. She wants to fix things and make them right, something that can also halfway sync into her conscious motivation because she really “does” want to rescue her sisters. The thing is, subconsciously, she’s not just looking for her sisters, she’s looking for redemption because of something “she” did, because of self-hate.

Conscious and Subconscious Motivation in a Core Event

In one of your blog posts you said something about making the character's external goal a symbol of their inner motivation (inner need) In the example you posted, you had a boy fighting for a cat (his external goal) because to him this cat represented the feeling of self-worth he got from his grandmother (who had a cat.)

love this post. One of my favorites.

I love the idea of linking the characters external goal and inner need, and using that need to drive not just the external goal, but all the character's decisions actions. But in some romance novels the character's external goal seems to take them right away from fulfilling their inner need eg the hero's unconscious inner need is for a close loving family, but his external goal is to take a job travelling from place to place and avoiding all emotional entanglements.
I can't work out what is driving the character in a case like this. (apart from fear ) The character's core need is a loving family . (He won't admit it and doesn't even realise it, but this is the only thing that will make him truly happy) but he's acting as if his need is escape.

This is actually two questions, one that deals with layering the transformational arc and another that deals with core events.

What do we know about this guy? (let's call him John)

*John needs a loving family to make him happy.
*But what John really wants and is actively pursuing is a wandering-man kind of job where he can keep all his emotional entanglements shallow.

Lots of people know what’ll make them happy so why does John have this disconnect?

Depending on the sub-genre, and the kind of person John is, it can be all kinds of things so...let’s say this is a straight-up contemporary and give him some background. John grew up with a loving, wonderful family. His mom and dad finally took off last year RVing around the country. He has a brother named Cal, a great sister-in-law and a niece who just turned eight. He's well adjusted, stable and ten years into a job at the hospital where he’s an anesthesiologist--rock-solid, right up until the day he decides to go winter camping with his brother and sister-in-law.

Because of a faulty GPS they end up in a ditch. Cal and his wife die in screaming agony while their little girl and John are trapped—unable to do anything but watch. By the time they’re found, the kid is all but catatonic. John’s parents can’t cope with Cal’s death, and there’s this girl—once the apple of their eye—who just sits there.

John is carrying huge survivor’s guilt—not helped by the fact his mom blames him for Cal’s death. If you’d been the one driving, if you’d pointed out the road, if you’d been able to tear free and get everyone out of the car…Never mind he was trapped in the wreckage.

Flash forward eight months. His mom and dad put the kid in a nursing home, leave for Arizona, and John has issues. His parents can’t stand the sight of him, he’s in serious emotional pain and he’s got crippling guilt. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that he should have died instead of Cal.

…in some romance novels the character's external goal seems to take them right away from fulfilling their inner need eg the hero's unconscious inner need is for a close loving family, but his external goal is to take a job travelling from place to place and avoiding all emotional entanglements.

John “wants” to run, can you doubt it? His parents hate him, his niece is a visible reminder of his failure, his beloved brother is gone—and it’s all his fault. He’s in pain. And when people are hurting, they try to avoid the source of that pain—which in John’s case is his family.

I can't work out what is driving the character in a case like this. (apart from fear ) The character's core need is a loving family . (He won't admit it and doesn't even realise it, but this is the only thing that will make him truly happy) but he's acting as if his need is escape.

He’s afraid to love, because love got him into this mess. No one can hurt you like a loved one. John loved his brother, but Cal died, he loved his mom and she rejected him. His niece is catatonic and with every passing day, John slips deeper into a downward spiral.

He doesn’t “want” a family, what he really wants is to get the hell out of Dodge.

People are enormously complex and have lots of motivations, many of which go back to a trigger or core event. If Cal hadn’t died, there would be no story—if John’s mom hadn’t done an Ordinary People on him, John wouldn’t be so messed up.

Deep down, John needs someone—a family or just the heroine—to accept him and give him the space to heal. It wasn’t his fault, but when the people who say they love you turn their backs on you, you don’t think logically. Right now John equates love with betrayal. He’s afraid of opening himself up to love because he’s in pain, angry at being betrayed by his parents, angry at himself for not being able to help his brother. Angry because he knows there was nothing he could do and guilty because deep down he knows he should have been able to do something. He’s not just running from the situation, he’s running from himself.

By the end of the story he'll realise what he needs to make him happy, but in planning my story do I make him motivated by escape -- or by family (his true need) ? Or maybe I should have him driven by escape until the midpoint, but then he begins to veer towards his true need (a loving family. )

It’s not that easy, and that’s the trouble with character-driven stories. They’re hard to plot because motivation isn’t always linear. John has issues only he can take care of. So it’s probably better to say his motivations are in a process of push and pull.

Internal conflict. Although the trouble with internal conflict is that it’s often subconscious. The John Cal's death has turned him into versus the John who can accept love and become the person he was meant to be.

Which means this…

…the idea of linking the characters external goal and inner need, and using that need to drive not just the external goal, but all the character's decisions actions.

...needs to be more complex.

The kid and his cat are a fairly simple way to link external goal and inner needs, because the kid has a single motivation and there are only two layers. The kid’s external goal—getting a cat, and his inner need—the self-worth represented by the cat.

Just like the kid, John’s external goal and inner need are in sync. He wants to get away because he wants to stop the pain. Everything he does flows out of that. But he also has stuff going on that he doesn’t know about—a subconscious need for love and family complicated by the fallout of his issues, which is cool because you want your people to be multi-dimensional but the trouble is—how to show it?

By giving him a goal that represents his subconscious need.

Think one layer down. Not something that represents his inner need—which is to stop the pain, but his subconscious need, which is for love and family.

In short, he needs his niece to get better.

Remember her? In a coma, totally unresponsive—locked away by the people who should have loved her? John loves her too, and visits every week. He can’t do anything for her—but he desperately “wants” her to get better.

She’s the symbol of everything he lost and everything he can gain. Her recovery is a visible manifestation of his transformational arc. And that’s what this question was all about—how to show John’s arc.

John was never motivated to actively seek a loving family, because through the entire book his motivation was always to get away. It’s through the process of coming to know and care for that family (or heroine) that he changes enough to start the healing process, accept and return love--and at that point, the end of the book, his motivation finally changes to actively pursuing his subconscious need because it's no longer subconscious.

When pt. A on the character arc is your character’s core event

You already “know” character arcs. You see them all around you—in stories, in movies, in everyday life.

There are upward driving arcs, downward driving arcs and static characters.

• People change through positive steps—on a macro-level, because the nitty-gritty of a story can include negative stuff.
• People change through negative, self-destructive steps.
• Or they don’t change at all for the duration of the story.

Everything more specific is a variation.

When you know the beginning truth of a character and his or her end state, you pretty much know what needs to happen in the story itself. In other words, need dictates shape. You can’t show change if the right story events aren’t there, regardless of whether those events happen in the first half so your person can change in order to do something, or come slowly, so the resolution of that change is the climactic moment.

I know that sounds pretty pat—so what I’d like you to do is think about your protagonist, or the person in your story with the biggest, most visible arc. Let’s call him John.

Back when I first started writing my characters sprang full-blown from my brain and jumped on the page. I’d start writing and little by little, John would start warping—a little this way, a little that. Then everything would go flat, and it’d be me pushing this guy around telling him to do stuff because the story needed him to be a certain way at a certain time.

Every story has a starting point. And for those people who’ve taken my core events workshop, or seen my videos—this next part will sound a little familiar, because Pt. A—for the purposes of a transformational arc is your character’s core event. The psychological reason your character reacts, consciously or subconsciously to story events in a given way. In other words, it’s your character’s truth for that particular story.

The reason John would go flat was because I didn’t know him.

I simply said, “He’s got issues,” without stopping to think what his issues were, where they came from and how they drove his arc. Knowing a core event or your character’s pt. A keeps your protagonist on track.

Suppose I say John has issues, but what I really mean is John is a “dark and dangerous” type. Good for rescuing fair maidens, Special Forces/SEAL stories, and regency rakes.

His arc is to change from being a dark and dangerous type into being a loving open person, capable of connecting with the heroine—which isn’t very specific. Instead of giving John a pt. A, I gave him a type.

Or, maybe I said John’s issue is that he’s closed off and doesn’t trust women. And I want him to open up and become a loving person capable of connecting with the heroine. Which is better, but I still have no particulars. I can “see” John, all dark and dangerous, closed off and untrusting, and I’m guessing his motivation is whatever I need to have happen in the plot.

Maybe it’s a historical regency and John wants to save his ancestral home—the one gambled away by his father. He goes off to India to make his fortune and returns only to find the man who won the property sold it to a woman (the heroine) who wants to use it as an orphanage.

Now I paste in:

His arc is to change from being a dark and dangerous type into being a loving open person, capable of connecting with the heroine.

And add:

he’s closed off and doesn’t trust women

This is what I know about John and assume to be the starting point on his arc—that and the fact that somewhere between what I know and the end of the book John changes from what I know, into a loving, open person capable of connecting with the heroine.

In other words, there’s a big gray foggy area where the arc should be. Percentiles and turning points don’t matter. What really matters is that I have no clue how to get John to the end of the story, although I might have a couple of scenes I want to use—a big scintillating ballroom scene, a John’s dad living with poor relations so John can “rescue” him scene, and a scene where John watches the heroine taking an ill child beggar from the streets back to his old family home where the kid recovers and turns into the requisite cute-kid complete with dog and lisp. 

With the other stuff I know about craft of writing, maybe I want to start with the action and have John find out about the sale of his home (in recent backstory) and have John rush to confront the heroine, only to see her…

…rescue an ill child beggar from the streets and take him back to John’s old family home where the kid recovers and turns into the requisite cute-kid complete with dog and lisp.

That’s good, right?

John’s a closed off jerk. He watches the heroine do something guaranteed to soften him a little because everyone loves little kids. He confronts the heroine, they argue, he feels something for her and starts/wants to change.

Which don’t get me wrong—does work, it’s simply stronger if pt. A drives a strong transformational arc.

Which means once you know what’s going on with John you need to ask “why?” Why is John closed-off and why doesn’t he trust women?

Maybe John’s dad really loved his mother, but she had only married him because he was rich. And one day, after cuckolding her husband for years, she left with a Frenchman.

Which leads to the question; how can this one event drive the entire character arc/story?

Because this one moment in time—the day John’s mom left—was the day John “knew” women weren’t to be trusted and closed himself off.

Like most kids, John loved his mom and got some kind of affection in return. He also got to watch his mom betray his dad, over and over again—which as a kid probably didn’t bother him since it was his norm. It’s only as he grows older that he begins to wonder, and then—his mom leaves with a hot French guy.

As an only child he’s invested in his mom—maybe his dad isn’t the most touchie-feelie man in the world—and when she leaves, it’s a betrayal and rejection. That sense of betrayal, loss and rejection, coupled with the knowledge he has about his mom crystallizes in one white-hot moment and locks into place.

Women “will” betray you. Women aren’t to be trusted. Opening yourself up to someone means opening yourself up to pain.

It’s John’s pt. A

It doesn’t happen in the story (in real-time, although it can in flashbacks because it's backstory)  and he’s probably repressing it big-time, but the fallout from that one particular event still drives him.

There are so many implications, and probabilities, and attitudes surrounding it, it’s like a comet collecting a debris field.

John’s dad really loved his wife and was devastated. He started gambling.

John refuses all the women his dad pushes at him, because women aren’t to be trusted.

The heroine (let’s call her Jane) is half-French, and John hates the French because his mom left with a Frenchman.

John suspects Jane is after his money, because his mom used his dad.

He’s not going to be feeling a whole lot of “something” toward Jane right off the bat because of his issues.

Which means to get from pt. A to pt. B, John has to realize not all women are like his mother, get over his hatred of the French and trust Jane not to use him—a much more John-specific goal for his arc.

Do you see your protagonist’s core event? What is it? Is it layered, or the beginning of a visible arc? Can you see the end of the arc, or the implications flowing from a core event that turn into story drivers?