I’m back to chat about the ever-amazing Donald Maass and the one-hour workshop a few weeks ago. Amidst my 5 pages of hastily scribbed notes (which some of, I must admit, I can’t decipher now) another thing I put in really big letters:
TAKE THEM TO FAILURE.
And in fact, I even underlined this, about six times. It’s pretty hard to miss on the page.
So what does that mean?
When I’m plotting things out, I can take a character right to the point where her pretty high heel pushes some dirt over the cliff, but do I ever just push them off? Do you? Maass made a comment that bringing a character back from destruction is more compelling. So let’s put a relationship in that perspective. Have you destroyed a relationship in your stories and brought it back? We all know what the black moment is, but how black is it?
There is a difference between the end of a relationship and the END of a relationship. When you write that black moment of a relationship — when all seems lost– how dark is it?
If you’re a Gilmore Girls fans, you know this picture is of Luke and Lorelai, who are one of my favorite TV couples. They had one of the best, most heart-wrenching breakup scenes I’ve ever seen…but it wasn’t the actual break-up that made it so. It was Lorelai’s reaction.
They break up after a particularly nasty exchange involving her parents and her ex (the father of her daughter, Rory.) Lorelai had realized that Luke was her ONE. It. All she wrote. And suddenly, he’s gone. The future she was going to share with him, gone. Nothing is right. Everything has changed, and it’s scary and painful. She retreated to her bedroom, away from the world, trying to deal with the pain. It was the type of breakup that throws everything you believed for your future into question.
That episode was not their only breakup, but it was the one that had significant emotional connection for me. I’d been in her shoes. I understood the shock of a dawning realization that everything you thought would be would never be. All the plans, the dreams, the building of who you are based on where you believe you are going… It was an END to not just a relationship, but an end to the person who would have been in that relationship. You have to rebuild your life, you have to rebuild who you thought you were.
So when Luke and Lorelai worked past it–as TV couples always do–it was so much more satisfying, because of how deep the well of emotion had gone. Because the writers had taken them to failure.
That is the gold standard for me in character breakups. In SOMETHING ABOUT HER, I wrote an end to the relationship between Blythe and Michael. They say goodbye in the story, but let’s face it, it’s a romance novel. The reader knows that’s not true. So how to we make that END compelling and gut-wrenching even in a situation when it’s a given that it won’t be an end? The characters have to believe it. And for that, I draw on my own experiences. And if that ever fails, I have Gilmore Girls on DVD.
What about you? What’s your “favorite” TV breakup? How far do you take your characters over that cliff? How do you show the black moments, the breakups even in a romance?
10 comments
This post is rather timely. I’ve recently finished putting my WIP through the critting mill. In this story, my heroine finds out the hero slept with her evil sister. That isn’t the black moment, but it leads to it.
Several of my crit partners worried I’d gone too far. I feel you can’t be too nice, otherwise you run the risk of your characters coming across as irrational and/or unreasonable or order to create a black moment.
So be mean, be nasty! Don’t worry, you’ll give them a HEA in the end 🙂
Thanks, Jeannie!
~Maggie
http://www.maggievanwell.com
http://www.lirw.org
Lol. I love Gilmore Girls too. In fact, it’s on right now. We’re back in the first season though. We watch it over and over again. As soon as I finishe the seventh season I put in the first. And it makes it so I don’t get much writing done. But it’s just so good. Lorelai’s break up with Luke was really sad. I’m really not good with writing emotions. It’s something I’m working on. I also don’t want my heroines to seem weak so I tend to go TOO light on the break down.
I can hear the moans… I haven’t seen Gilmore Girls. But I’m with Honoria in that I like strong heroines. I am finding that I’m writing stronger and more intense black moments lately. ‘Showing’ a lot more emotion.
TV breakup… I can’t think of one off the top of my head. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I’ve got a fairly serious break up scene in the current WIP. She’s an assistant District Attorney and he’s a Public Defender. They have a case together. NOT a good idea to be fooling around. They have a royal knock-down, drag-out scene in public over his client. And they do get back together. Of course. It’s a romantic suspense. LOL. We’ve got to torture and kill our darlings! Right? Right!
I was shopping my finished WIP in October 2007 when I went to a one-day Fire in Fiction workshop Donald Maass gave. I came home with 20 pages of notes, after I typed them up, single spaced.
I withdrew my novel from submission and signed up for his weeklong Writing the Break-Out Novel Intensive workshop last March. It was unbelievable, and I’ve now spent another entire year putting his advice into play.
We’ll see if it’s worth it. But my husband said the post-Maass version was a quantum leap over the one I was shopping in 2007.
@ Maggie
I think you are right. In order for it to feel REAL, you can’t be nice about something like that. He slept with her SISTER? ACK! I’m hoping that was pre-relationship. LOL
But I agree, you have to make it authentic. It has to feel as gritty and difficult as it would it real life, especially with the HEA coming. Otherwise, no one will buy the emotions.
@Honoria – Gilmore Girls is the best. Amazing dialogue, terrific storylines, a fabulous couple to root for. (And don’t even get me STARTED on how Rory and Logan ended. Argh.)
It’s a good point – how to straddle making the emotions real without making them pathetic. It’s tough. I think you can show extreme emotion and not make them weak. It’s not so much the emotions or even what they are feeling in that moment, IMO, it’s more how they process it and what they do with it after that makes them stronger or weaker, I think.
You can’t control how you feel, and characters shouldn’t be able to, either. But you can control how you ACT upon it.
@ Lavada — If you ever get the chance to see it, it’s a great series. A really strong example of snappy, good dialogue. Although my hubby and I joke that as entertaining as Lorelai Gilmore is (the Mom), she would be exhausting in real life. 🙂
@ Silver — In public?!?!?! Oh, that’s good. I love public displays in books. LOL Very interesting!
And yes, torture the darlings…torture, torture, torture!!
@ Katrina — I might just be picking your brain to see what you learned! That’s fabulous. I imagine it was something that was worth every single penny.