Good morning everyone, ready to start today’s task? As always, we are going to go back to our five sentences, give them a once over, see if they need any adjustments as we progress further. So, please flip to your five sentences and we will wait.
Today, the Sesame Street Theme song is playing in my brain, again, no idea why, just is. Sing along if you dare.
All right everyone has looked over their five sentences and we are ready to go. Today we are going to have some fun asking the question why. We know how our characters got to the beginning part of the story. Much of it is background that while useful for us, may or may not ever appear in our actual story. It is all information we need, but what we need as writers is not always the same thing as what readers need.
Not so much for the why.
It is true that sometimes people, both real and fictional, behave erratically and without any visible reason. But the truth is that while we may not see it, there is, most of the time, a reason. Even if that reason isn’t a sensible one. A person breaking the bulbs in streetlamps because they think the light will summon the nanowave worms from deep in the earth to slip into people’s ears and feed off their brains is still a reason. In that person’s mind they are doing it to keep humanity safe. Even if no one else realizes it.
Whether someone believes the reason or not is another matter (and could be part of your plot depending on what you are writing and how you structure it). The point is there is a reason why. And in writing, we need to know the why even if we choose not to share all with the reader.
Thus far, we have our main character at the beginning of their story. Events in their life have led them to this point. They are in an established place. To get them to move out of their place, something has to happen. In some stories, it could be a random event. An explosion at the factory that employs most of the town, falling in love, leaving for a new job, beginning a quest.
The character may or may not have control over the why. But we still need a reason for the event to propel them out of their current place in the world. The example we are using in these posts is our dear friend, the put upon Bob. Sentence 2 had him in a job he hates and we learned how he got to that job in our previous task. But now, following our five points, he is going to get fired. It is an event outside his control (possibly. It could be something he did deliberately. That all depends on how we write it).
He may have contributed to the firing, it may be entirely up to someone else. Bob may never know the true reason he was fired. But something happened to cause the firing. It could be the result of one action or a balance shifting the tipping point. But there is a why.
So the task.
Take the third sentence (from your task two five sentence task) and write down five points that led from where our character was at the start to where the third sentence takes over. Events do not have to be in chronological order at this point, this is not a chapter break out. We will look at the order later (and chances are they will move around and be added to), so at this point don’t worry if you wrote down something for point one that can’t come before point three. This is a mobile list for now. Brainstorming if you prefer. And so we look to Bob as our example.
Example
Our third sentence: His father-in-law fires him.
1-Bob starts passing duties over to some of the family members who are willing to take them. Not all want the responsibilities of the work, but more than one wants to ‘be in charge’. Or at least be seen to be in charge. They start to resent that he is seen to have more power, i.e. doling out responsibilities to them.
2- Bob discovers his wife is having an affair.
3- Bob finds out someone is embezzling from the company funds.
4-Henry (FiL) likes the person Sarah is having an affair with better than Bob and wanted them to marry so thinks that if he fires Bob, they have a better chance of getting divorced leaving the way clear for the man he likes.
5- To save the company after Henry’s heart attack Bob had to implement some changes to keep them financially stable. While he explained them at the time, now that the crisis has passed Henry doesn’t like them, partially because they aren’t the way things were always done (tradition) but mostly because they weren’t Henry’s ideas. In addition that Bob put them is a personal insult to him and makes Henry realize that he should have thought of them but didn’t. He thinks Bob believes he is smarter than he is and since Henry already didn’t like Bob this is intolerable.
Okay perhaps some of those breakout points were a little more than they needed to be, but I wanted to point out that each point doesn’t have to be a single sentence. It can be, or it can be a few sentences that explain (at least to yourself) what is going on with a character. In this example a lot of the firing is done because of Henry’s perception of Bob rather than a horrible mistake Bob made. I should also mention that in this example I chose to have Bob propelled out of his current place in the world by outside forces and not internal ones. There will be internal thoughts, but since Bob took the job on behalf of others, I wanted hm kicked out by those same others.
And yes, I know it is an example, but it is the story line I prefer, and I suspect after using Bob as an example I will eventually feel compelled to write the story. Bit for now, this is Task number Five. My task will be posted momentarily and I will see you tomorrow for the next task.
Ten til Midnight 