Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash
Today’s post is by author and book coach Janet S Fox.
How can you create a truly memorable story? By giving your main character a righteous motive, a flaw, and a series of escalating decisions leading to the balance edge of an impossible choice.
Let’s replay a moment in the crisis scene in Star Wars Episode 6, “Return of the Jedi.”
The Emperor tells Luke Skywalker: “You want this, don’t you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.”
Luke has turned away, his back to the camera, his gaze focused on the rebel fleet that is facing ultimate destruction. We can almost feel his temptation. If he strikes down the Emperor, he will become powerful enough to save his friends. But he will lose his soul to the dark side of the Force. If he stands firm in his resolve to be good, his friends will die.
It’s a brilliant moment of moviemaking, heightened by the fact that we can’t see Luke’s face as he wrestles with a bitter choice.
Bitter choices make powerful characters.
The writing exercise that changed everything for me
When I went to my first workshop with agent and teacher Donald Maass, I was working on what ended up becoming my most popular middle grade novel—but I wasn’t there with it yet. Donald helped me take it to the next level.
One of the exercises he gave us was critical to that evolution.
Donald asked us to choose a big scene—one of our turning point scenes. Brainstorm ideas for different responses, actions, reactions with our main characters. Try something utterly different with the scene. Make a list of no fewer than ten ideas.
Not knowing where he was going with this, but wanting something big to play with, I chose my crisis scene, near to the end of the book. A big, dramatic moment.
After we’d made our list, he said, “Now rewrite the scene using the last idea you created.”
(I love this technique, that forces us to brainstorm until our internal defenses drop and we come up with an out-of-the-box option.)
My tenth idea was to turn my main character, for a brief moment, toward the dark side. To give her a way to step back and think, “If I make this choice, I will become powerful enough to save my friends.”
and then, “But I will also become pure evil.”
This is now my very favorite scene in the book, one that showed my character’s nuance and depth, a point at which she could have gone over to the dark side and become a mirror to the truly terrible antagonist. and this was due to her character flaw. Her stubborn nature was crucial to finding herself trapped by this choice.
As I revised, I expanded this nuance to enrich her character with every choice she made up to that moment. My revisions made all her choices, throughout the story, difficult and contingent upon her stubbornness, though not as bad as that one final and pivotal choice.
Luke Skywalker makes choices earlier in Star Wars that suggest he’s vulnerable. He starts wearing black. He modifies his light saber. He fights with Yoda, ignores warnings, insists he must save his friends no matter the consequences. He’s imperfect. He’s his father’s son. He could be persuaded to turn, and the Emperor knows it.
His character flaw: he’s impetuous. He could choose the wrong path because although his motives are righteous, he’s impetuous, and that makes all the difference.
Deepening character through bitter choices
Let’s look at what you can do in your current story, to deepen your character through bitter choices.
- First, make sure your main character has a righteous motive. Her righteous motive should be large enough to be impactful, and true to the mission of all heroes: saving of others, saving the world.
- Next, define her character flaw, one that will trap her in bad choices. Her flaw, whatever it is, must be revealed by little steps in early scenes—her impetuousness, her ability to lie just a little, her tendency to be just a teeny bit cruel, her stubborn attitude—and that flaw will create a potential trap, as every decision she makes will show the reader how precarious her position could become.
- Then find a scene late in your story, maybe the crisis or the climax scene. What impossible choice can you force on your main character? Go left, and save yourself/your friends, but lose your soul. Go right, and they all die, but you remain good. Can you make your main character go really dark, even for a moment? For a few sentences or half a page? Can you make her motives righteous, but dangerous? Make her flaw the trap she just might fall into?
- Moving backward through your manuscript, find all the places where your character has to choose something, even something trivial. Can you force her to wrestle with this choice? Show herself to be slightly untrustworthy, or moderately ambitious, or just a little bit biting? Don’t go as far as you did in the big scene; but hint that maybe she could be persuaded to fall into the trap because, after all, though her motives are righteous, her flaw is potentially deadly.
Your main character wants to do the right thing. She loves her friends. She wants to be happy. But like all people, she has a flaw, and in the course of the story you’re creating, she’ll show herself through her choices. Both her righteous nature and her flaw will become apparent.
You will prime your audience to believe that she could accept the dark side.
Create the balance edge of a bitter choice
Readers expect a story might “show them the way” to behave. There must be a moment where a story’s main character understands the righteous path, even if the ending is tragic because the character chooses wrong. A bitter choice creates a balance edge, tipping the character and audience one way or the other.
Luke Skywalker, confronted by the Emperor in a scene like the one above, but earlier in his maturation, would have responded impetuously. He would have made a really bad choice. We believe that he still could, and that makes this moment in the movie so tense, emotional, and memorable. That he chooses to be good is the catharsis we need, with an uplifting ending.
Great tragedies (if that’s what you’re writing) tip the other way, toward the darkness, but with equal power and memorable quality.
Give your main character a righteous motive, a flaw, and a series of escalating choices leading to that balance edge of bitter choice, and you’ll create a memorable story, too.
Janet Fox is the award-winning author of nine books for young readers, including three YA novels, three middle grade novels, two picture books, and one middle grade non-fiction, with more coming soon. Janet is a book coach and former teacher and has an MFA in writing for children from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is launching a mentorship program for kidlit writers in 2024.
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