Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

A Changing Central Character

A changing Central Character.

So having talked about the importance of knowing where you’re going with your story let me say again that it won't be is necessary in the is workshop for the writer to know exactly where that is. The workshop is designed to help you figure out where you want to go. While you don’t have to figure it out right away by the time you finish you will definitely know where the story is heading and where that point is down the road, where you will be ultimately be writing “The End”

So a story is a journey and the reader or audience signs up to enter a vicarious relationship with your characters and follow along for the ride. Ok, with that understanding, What is it that readers or audiences are straining to see? Sure they want to see the story played out but what are they looking for along the way…The answer to that is CHANGE! Hopefully it’s change for the better but in a tragedy in might well be change for the worse…There are lessons to be learned in both and if the change is positive we traditionally thought of the story as a comedy and if it was negative it was called a tragedy.

Let me make a point here for the benefit of my younger readers. In the traditional sense comedy was not the situational or stand-up comedy you’re familiar with. It referred to whether or not the ending of the drama was happy or sad. In the end the reader or audience experiences a pathos which can be either laughter or tears. It is a venting of emotions which can be uplifting or gut wrenching but either way it’s the cathartic pay-back the consumer hopes to receive in return for the cost of the book or the price of admission.

Remember the Dramatic Premise….How you looked at the synopsis earlier and wrote that premise in both a negative and positive sense….How I said that DP was the backbone of the story. Well the thread of what the audience will be looking to discover is a trend line showing that change.….Will it lead the CC to becoming a better person or lead him/or her to destruction. Will in the end the audience feel warm and fuzzy or will they be disconsolate and moved to tears.

The Greeks who invented drama knew that a good story can be satisfying with either the most positive or negative of outcomes. They liked a happy ending but they also lived much closer to the edge than we do today. They tended to carry much more emotionally laden baggage than we do today and welcomed a mechanism to help them get some of it off their chest. The writer needs to decide which direction on the continuum this tale is headed and prepare the reader emotionally for where it’s going… The key to doing this is a moving target, where the CC is constantly in a state of flux , undergoing changes that the reader can see, follow and relate to and anticipate where the whole story is going.