Hi! My name is Jodi. You can call me Granny Jo. I always
thought I was the strange, kind of backwoods granny without a filter, sort of
like Duck Dynasty does Granny
Clampett, but I suspect I’m more of the geeky, weird granny who runs around in
Crocs and writes on her arm with sharpies.
Recently, I got out of a workshop on
advanced alternative GMC where I had the pleasure of talking to Janet again.
Janet has a mind like a steel trap and calls me out anytime I weasel word
something. Lucky for me, she had a question about Hague. I’m not sure if it
means this particular section of the workshop needed to be reworked or if it was
just a question and I’m over-thinking it. I’d asked if she could
see the events between pt. A (the way a character starts out at the beginning
of the transformational point) and pt. B (how they change)?
I can see some of them
(the really big ones) but I'm not sure how much change the character needs to
show in the first half of the story between the inciting incident and midpoint
Michael Haigh in his Identity
to Essence lectures says the character shows a significant change at the
midpoint stepping into his/her "essence" before one last reversion to
identity, but it's the part up to the midpoint that I'm not sure how to plan. He mentions the character glimpsing his/her
essence early on before the midpoint but he didn't say any more than this.
True, he doesn’t say much more, but I’ve always had the
feeling he kind of assumed there was going to be a push and pull of conflict as
the character races toward the transformational point.
Kim’s arc is to let go of pain and open up to love again, a
statement which really doesn’t spell out what needs to be in the story or how
much of it there needs to be. However, you might say Kim’s essence (who she
really is on the inside) is an open, loving woman with no pain, and she first glimpses that when she goes over for the
first dinner.
“Oh...” she thinks to herself, “this is what it would be
like if life was different, if I could let go of my pain and accept love back
into my life. It’s so warm and…I really want it.”
But she can’t, because she’s got a lot of trauma and guilt
(her subconscious conflict) Her conscious conflict (she just doesn’t have time
for a man in her life, especially not with the B&B getting ready to launch
and staying true to her husband’s dream) tells her to push Jason away (in the
process she’s also pushing away Tyra, a total win-win). Consciously, she’s just
trying to stay on track, while subconsciously she’s afraid of pain, and
suffering from “I can’t love this child, that’s a betrayal of Cleo’s memory. I
killed Cleo. I let her down. I can’t let
her down again.”
However, her essence (the open, loving woman without pain)
is pulling at her, forcing her along the path that leads to Jason and Tyra. It’s
her subconscious goal.
However, there’s a condition to the way Kim’s conflict works
to show change in her arc. Her change needs to happen in feasible increments. She
can take one step back and one step forward, or three steps forward and a
gigantic step back, but the progression of her change has to work for the story
and projected word count. Kim simply can’t go from “I’m hurting and messed up,”
to “Aww…I luv you.” She has too much baggage.
The events you pick as the starting and change points of
your character predetermine how much change needs to happen between the start
of the arc and the final wrenching struggle where the character fights change
(the black moment). Kim can’t be healed in a short story because people don’t
easily toss years of painful baggage aside. She needs space to show the
progression of her arc, which means the amount of change to show before the
black moment depends on two things; the events you pick as the starting point
and point of change, and word count.
Because I picked such a difficult arc, more change needs to
happen in a way that’s believable for a reader. However, if I were to pick a
shorter arc (maybe from the death of her husband due to natural causes until
her realization love can happen twice) there’s less to show.
In this part of the
story how aware will the character be that s/he is changing? Will s/he realise at all (and maybe
rationalise it away with an external reason for acting in a different way) or
will it just be the reader who can see it and maybe the catalyst character?
The reader is usually aware of what’s going on because they
can see into the character, feel her thoughts and hear her self-talk. In many
stories, the point of change happens when the character becomes self-aware and
starting acting on their subconscious goal. Kim has been trying to change ever
since that first dinner with Jason and his kid, but until she realizes pain and
self-hatred are standing in her way, she can’t release them and step into her essence.
If she realizes she’s changing, it probably happens in
flashes of “I really want this” only to be rationalized away by “I must be
tired and maudlin” or “I just don’t have time for this.”
I think the hero sees it on a certain level, although subconsciously.
It’s the intangible that gives him the faith to keep going, even when Kim is
fighting herself. So yes—in flashes for him too, complicated by his own
internal conflict.
