The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass

Author:Donald Maass [Maass, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2016-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

Catalyst and Catharsis

When was the last time you blew your top? For me, this isn’t a particularly difficult question to answer—did I mention that I’m a dad? When my kids push me over the edge, the transgression often is, in the great scheme, a trivial one. A year from now will I care? A decade from now?

No, probably not.

And yet, ka-boom!

There’s something interesting about my explosions, though. If they are big enough, they result in a “family talk.” Mostly that means Mom and Dad talking sternly. The kids say less, but more often than not they reveal the hidden reasons for their misbehavior. Thanks to my explosion, the lid is off. Confessions, needs, and secret fears come tumbling out. Bad behavior becomes understandable. Solutions arise. We accomplish something.

Another way to say it is that the explosion releases the truth. Kids who cannot express themselves except through nonverbal actions suddenly find their words. The explosion clears a space. The worst has happened and so, paradoxically, the family now becomes a place of safety. The explosion has somehow given us all strength.

We’re talking about catharsis. Notice two things about catharsis: There is a catalyst and there is a consequence, often a positive one. There’s the match that lights the fuse and the new freedom that follows the bang.

In your work in progress (WIP), what is the catalyst event that causes the seething pot of your protagonist’s inner conflicts to boil over? How does your protagonist act out? What is released? Who else is affected? What change results?

You used to be able to count on Stephen King for fear, but these days you can count on him for much, much more: a full range of emotional experience from one of our greatest storytellers. His novel Joyland (2013) is a beach read potboiler about New Hampshire college student Devin Jones, who, dumped by his girlfriend and feeling despondent, takes a summer job at a theme park called Joyland. The park is haunted (quite literally) by a long-ago murder in a funhouse ride. Though he cannot get over his ex-girlfriend, Devin rotates jobs in the park and learns the lingo and lore of the carny types who are its permanent staff.

What shakes Devin out of his funk and sets him on the road to redemption is an unexpected event on opening day, when, for the first time, he wears the suffocating character costume of Howie, the park’s dog mascot. Amid the hectic swirl he sees a line of little kids being led toward a day-care building, Howie’s Howdy House, where they are left so their parents can enjoy lunch at the park’s class-A restaurant, Rock Lobster. Ditched by their parents, the kids are terrified. Some are crying. The “Hokey Pokey” is playing over the public address system.

Buried in the Howie costume, looking out through the screen mesh that served as eyeholes and already sweating like a pig, I thought I was witnessing an act of uniquely American child abuse. Why would you bring your kid—your

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