 Drama: November 09, 2022 Issue [#11646] |
This week: Drama in Tough Spots and Desperations Edited by: Joy  
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“Sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of wrong choices and no right ones. You just have to choose which wrong choices feels the least wrong.”
Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
“The next thing I knew, I was falling. I dreamed I was being thrown into an open grave, but jerked awake and landed on a bed.”
Eric Jerome Dickey, Finding Gideon
“Beliefs are choices. First you choose your beliefs. Then your beliefs affect your choices.”
― Roy T. Bennett
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about creating drama by having the characters choose among equally tough decisions.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Do your characters find themselves trying to make choices between or among unbelievably difficult options? If you have written such a story and pulled it off well enough, consider yourself a big success.
Granted, drama doesn’t always lie in desperation and it can be found in many things, but most of the time when a character has to make a devastating choice, you’ll find that your readers are hooked on your every word. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice has such difficult options in it, the most devastating one being a mother who has to choose between the lives of her two children. This book was later made into a movie, with equal or even more success.
Such situations are difficult and some of us grow to love the characters we create. Then, no one wants to see people suffer and to make their characters have to opt among two or more horrific options because writing them equals to, just about, living them.
Still, as writers, you don’t want to avoid such difficult situations because there is drama not only in your characters’ choices but also in their facing and deliberating that dilemma beforehand and the stain or hurt that such a choice leaves in their souls and their lives afterwards. That is drama tripled many times over, in step with your planning.
The impact of such a do-or-die choice lies mostly in the internal life and a character’s self-identification. While it will also affect the external circumstances, it’ll mostly show in the character’s relationships with other people since this choice will make major changes in his psyche.
To present a difficult choice in a tight spot for your character consider these possibilities:
 Create options equally demanding, equally horrible, or equally enticing where their consequences are concerned. In other words, there has to be no “lesser one of the two evils.”
Create equally horrific or equally luring options where the character’s convictions, education, or upbringing will be tested.
Always challenge the status quo, the character, the options, and when possible, use symbolisms.
Don’t prolong the character’s deliberation time while choosing. Too long deliberating by the character can cause you lose the readers. Instead, make the time frame for deliberations as short as possible.
Yet, punish a rushed decision. As a result, more drama can be created as the product of the rushed decision.
Show the consequences if possible and maybe even intensify them, especially where the character’s internal life is concerned.
At the end, since you’ve made it worse for your character or all the characters, you may even have them question themselves such as: “Who have I turned into?” “Who am I?” “How could I do/choose what I did?” etc. This musing is a device of complexity that can lead to other stories in a series; plus, it will show the previously unknown sides of a personality.
Here are two good articles on the subject:
https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/how-to-make-your-characters-choices-...
https://thewritepractice.com/dilemma-choice/
May all your characters’ options be extremely difficult and may your stories rock!
Until next time and… Best of Luck Nanoers! 
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This Issue's Tip: Hearts and minds are complicated. Cherish ambiguity when creating a character.
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Feedback for "What Are Backstories Good for?"
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BIG BAD WOLF is Howling 
Sometimes you need a paragraph of backstory, to explain a few things.
True. But it works better when that paragraph is inside the story and is not the opening paragraph, unless you can make it into a whole new chapter with scenes in it and then say that it happened such and such time ago.
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~HarvestSilverMoon~ 
It would be so cool to have a class about backstory and learn how to incorporate it.
I agree. Thanks for the input.
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brom21 
I would say most if not all my stories are generated by vague but discernable backstory or a plot. Often, I can glean substantial content from an appealing title. Sometimes the backstory idea tends to become unstable and go into a meltdown. lol. But, I've used this method of having a general vision for my whole writing life. And it always works, I find.
That's great. Whatever works for you. Backstory, IMO, always leads to new stories even when it stays hidden.
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