Tag Archives: Hero’s Journey

Orca Blog for December 2021 – On Sympathy and Pity, Hope and Despair

Do readers sympathize with your characters, or do they pity them? Do they have hopes and desires, or are they mired in despair? Some submissions we’ve received in the last few weeks have me thinking about the differences.

Creative writing instructors are fond of telling students that character sympathy is critical to the reader’s engagement with a story. Sympathy implies that the reader understands the character’s situation. Typically it’s a desire yet unfulfilled, or a problem the character needs to solve. In other words, there must be something about the character’s existence that the reader can identify with, and by identifying can then judge the decisions the character ultimately makes.

Pity is closer to compassion, and often means to feel sorry for someone. But in fiction it doesn’t necessarily mean identification with the character’s situation. In thinking about it, I can’t help remembering those TV commercials in which abused pets stare longingly into the camera, or the ones filled with images of critically sick children. The feeling that I get while watching is not one of sympathy, it’s one of sorrow coupled with guilt—shouldn’t I do something about this, and if I am doing something is it enough? We have to remember that these ads, as emotional as they are, are part of a marketing campaign designed to raise funds for the cause. The goal is different from what we’re trying to accomplish in fiction. Even the most touching, deeply emotional fictional story is still a form of entertainment, and that’s why getting the reader to identify with a protagonist is important to its success—readers should like (or at least understand) and root for the protagonist.

The sympathy we seek to establish in fiction is connected to a variety of elements in a story, such as forward momentum, rising tension, and a climax and resolution. That last one implies that a character will have a realization* and will have to make a decision to move forward incorporating it.

Decision making implies hope for a better future—I don’t know too many characters, or people in general, who make decisions designed to make things worse for themselves. And that hope is also important to the success of your story. People usually want things to work out in their lives. In order for them to identify with your characters, then your characters should hope for things to get better. I’ve seen some stories recently in which the characters do not have hope. Things go from bad to worse for them, and by the end of the story they simply give up. Readers have a hard time identifying with giving up. It seems counter to human nature, and especially so in the United States, where we have a history of striving to make a better life. We like people who fight for what they believe in. We’re not so crazy about the ones who give up.

Most good fiction includes bad things happening to your characters. Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing a short story includes this: Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey has a similar requirement: Step 7, the Supreme Ordeal (known as the Cave Scene in screenwriting), in which the main character must face a situation so dire that it forces her to face herself, decide who she really is and how she will respond. But note that each implies the possibility (hope) that things will get better.

Give your characters hope, even if it’s just a glimmer, and they will be sympathetic to your readers.

* This is not true 100% of the time. It’s actually more important for the reader to have the revelation. Sometimes characters just don’t get it.

Image by Press 👍👍 Love you 💖 from Pixabay

Orca Blog for March, 2019 – The Mathematics of Writing

Is there a formula for creative success?

Writers and critics disdain formulaic writing, but what if there were a mathematical formula for writing? Maybe there is.

In an article in The Writer’s Chronicle a couple of years ago, poet/teacher Leslie Ullman wrote of her fascination with the mathematical relationships between numbers and writing, particularly the Golden Spiral. To really understand the relationship that inspired her, check out the article (you have to be an AWP member). Essentially, it began with a couple of ancient mathematical concepts that have persevered through the centuries.

The Golden Mean was a relationship advanced by Pythagoras and Plato that established a “golden” point on a straight line segment. (Bear with me, this really does pertain to writing.) At that point, the smaller segment of line is .618 the length of the larger segment, and the larger segment is .618 the length of the original line. This magic .618 factor also comes into play in a variety of mathematical concepts, including the Fibonacci sequence, architectural applications like the pyramids and modern works, and many others. As importantly, it can be applied to many natural occurrences, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of a variety of flowering plants, the spirals of shells, generations of bees, and the curve of waves. It can even be applied to the measurements of DNA molecules. The Golden Mean’s ratio yields the Golden Spiral, “an orderly spiral that gets farther from its point of origin by a factor of .618 with each quarter turn it makes.”

Got that? Okay, here’s the writing part:

If .618 occurs naturally as a ratio between numbers and arrangements, does it have any significance in literature?

The eight ball says, “Signs point to yes.” (Or is that the .618 ball?)

Sonnets have fourteen lines. Ullman notes that in the Petrarchan sonnet the placement of the volta, or turning point, comes after the eighth line, which is quite close to the Golden Mean (grant some leeway here because fourteen lines is a pretty small sample size). English sonnets morphed from the Petrarchan, but maintain echoes of this same trait.

Ullman’s article focuses on poetry. But I couldn’t help wondering if this worked in prose as well? The turning point in a narrative is a major key to its success. So are we naturally predisposed to react to change at a certain point in a story, to feel the narrative morph in an orderly way from its origin to its climax and resolution? In the Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell laid out twelve steps by which the hero character in ancient literature went from average person to hero. Step 7 is the “Supreme Ordeal,” described as “…the person’s lowest point or darkest moment. The separation has been made between the old world and old self and the potential for a new world/self. By entering this stage, the person shows her/his willingness to make a change, to die and become a new person.” Step 7 is the closest to .618 in a sequence of twelve.

In that vein, Dan Harmon, the writer who created “Community,” and whose YouTube videos are quite popular with writers these days, demands that his team stick to the hero’s journey cycle and will not even entertain drafts that drift too far from the .618 rule.

Let’s see if it actually works in practice. From my collection of digitized classics I randomly chose Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” translated by Constance Garnett. Word count is 6724. That means somewhere around 4155 words we should see a shift in the character. I scrolled to that point, and just a few words before the textual Golden Mean, I found this paragraph:

Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And he had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly; he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything.

Sounds like change, my friends.

I tried another, “In the Dry,” a classic in my opinion, by Breece D’J Pancake. 5126 words. The change point would be around 3168. Only a sentence later is this:

On the path to the shed, a strangeness creeps through him: he remembers walking this way—nights, years ago—and Bus yelling, “I’m going to show you something, Ottie.”

This is getting scary.

Keep in mind that to be more certain of the significance of these findings I would have to reread the stories from the start. But these passages definitely indicate turning points in the characters’ narrative arcs, at which events have caused them to begin to rethink their present lives.

But now the real test—one of mine. I chose a published story titled “A Teaching Moment.” It contains 3923 words, so a turn should occur around 2424. Here, at exactly word 2424, is text from the story:

There was no sense bringing up commitment. I couldn’t move to take her in my arms, or invoke some other movie cliché to save the scene. I just lay there, helpless, useless. She’d managed the end of our relationship perfectly. Who knew the real reason she wanted out? But I couldn’t argue at that point. All I know is that even if she came back now, all would be forgiven.

God, I do miss her.

Yikes. Since I wrote it, I can honestly report this passage ends the second of three sections, and positions the character for his psychological change.

This is just my opinion and could well be disproved. But I think it won’t be. A traditionally well-crafted story (or poem or novel) creates its effect on the reader by building an emotional case, and then advancing to climax and resolution. Think of it as a controlled spiral of increasing tension. Is the 61.8 percent point in the narrative the trigger where the reader’s mind is properly prepared to begin the rise to climax? This deserves more investigation.

Try it for yourself. Take something you’ve read and enjoyed, or something you’ve written and look for the point at which the narrative begins to turn. I’m more than curious to know what you discover.

–Joe Ponepinto