Rapid Story Development by Lyons Jeff

Author:Lyons, Jeff [Lyons, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

Pattern of Decline

As stated earlier, the pattern of decline is the pattern of behavior and emotion that defines the manner in which your protagonist falls from grace over the course of the story. This process is not random or haphazard. It’s not just you, the writer, figuring out bad ways to make your protagonist bleed emotionally. Just as you shouldn’t make a character do something in action on the page out of your whimsy or caprice (“Hey, let me stick in a car chase here because I think it’s cool”), so you never want to have your protagonist (or any character) end up in emotional pain just because you think it’s a fun thing to do. There should always be a story reason for the pain, or the action, and that reason should always source (as much as possible) from the moral blind spot of the character.

This is where the Enneagram comes to the rescue because, otherwise, how is a writer to know what constitutes a valid story reason? How do you find dramatically meaningful dots to connect that lead to great moments of drama or comedy? At first glance, it appears to most writers that this is just a fly-by-the-seat process, because there is no roadmap. But, as the Enneagram has demonstrated, there is a roadmap; in fact there are many maps and pathways (nine of them, to be exact) down which you can send your protagonist—making them the architects of their own emotional demise in a way that will strike readers as authentic.

The pattern of decline is a concrete way to visualize how all the constricting patterns of an Enneagram style work together to paint a picture of a character in crisis. The first thing to understand is that the overall pattern of decline is embedded in the larger structure of the basic workflow of the story’s middle. It is the pattern that gets the protagonist from the start of the adventure (inciting incident) to their emotional low point and the Doom Moment (Figure 12.2 ).

As you can see from the figure, the pattern of decline is embedded between the Inciting Incident and the Doom Moment. This is what I meant earlier when I said the two layers (structural and behavior) are both part of the middle of any story, they just overlap and support one another. While the Classic Story Middle is unfolding according to reversal beats, midpoint complications and the like, the embedded patterns of the narrative middle (decline and elevation) are also playing out simultaneously giving emotional life to all the action beats and scenes within the story.

The Pattern of Decline follows the loop created in the problem/consequence, proactive choice, proactive effect, and offer-refusal workflow segment of the narrative engine middle (Figure 12.3 ).

Figure 12.2 Pattern of Decline Parent

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