“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”
—Hafiz of Shiraz
A friend of mine posted this picture of the painted stairs at Shakespeare and Company on her social media feed, and I found myself almost wistful for this kind of sentiment. I’ve been dancing with darkness lately, because my tendency toward light has always been a little frenetic and a little desperate. But honestly… I’m a person who is naturally inclined toward the light, anyway.
Being light-inclined is not better than being inclined toward darkness. Some of the people I love most in the world have rich, dark, gooey centers and can stare ugly truths in the face while filing their nails without missing a beat. I find that damned impressive.
But it’s not who I am, and I know this. I can play in darkness, but I’m always going to align with light. The important thing is to know (and accept) who and what you are, and be that. Know that you’re choosing one or the other, or a balance, because that’s who you are, not because you’re afraid of the way not chosen.
Maybe it’s broken, and doesn’t work. Maybe it’s a house for a Jinn. Maybe it’s plain, but pretty, or ornately decorated or shaped like an elephant. Maybe it’s dusty, and old. Maybe it’s in a shop window, and your character wants it really, really bad but can’t afford it.
What does a lamp mean in your story? What does the desire for light mean? And how does your character deal with that?
Every now and again I head over to TV Tropes to find a trope for this section, and it’s always fun. Today, I found The Light is Not Good, the trope where we see that characters who appear to be Good are not. Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a good example of this, but so is Aziraphale from Good Omens, with Crowley as his counterpart from Team Dark is Not Evil. Aziraphale is an angel who is not morally or ethically perfect; Crowley is a demon whose evil is honestly more mischief than anything else.
The fun part about setting up an expectation—say, that the hero is capital-G Good or that an angel is never not Good—is subverting that expectation along the way. Plus, as we’ve discussed… nothing is ever just one thing. It is impossible to be always Good, because no matter what you do, if you look hard enough, you’ll find a negative effect. So what is the point of even being Good, if you can’t be perfectly good? And all evil, all the time is also boring.
The complexity of being human (which is how all sentient characters are coded) is where the meaning comes from. The choices we make, the knowledge that we can never be perfect, the acceptance of faults in ourselves and in others. It’s the texture that makes life interesting. A smooth surface has no grip.
“I’m struggling with my pinch points at the moment. They’re mostly described as the antagonist making their presence known in some way—but what can I do in a mystery, where I want to conceal my antagonist until the end? Can it be virtually anything else that creates more difficulty for my protagonist and gets in the way of her solving the case??”
—Pincher
Dear Pincher,
I’ve never heard the term “pinch points” before, but I love it! Thanks for adding to my terminology vocabulary, and now I’ll pay you back by giving you the key to your problem.
You don’t need to reveal your antagonist. You don’t need for the reader to know who your antagonist is. Hell, I wrote an entire novel where I didn’t know who my antagonist was until I was almost done.
But neither can you just have random shenanigans get in the way of your protagonist; whatever blocks your protagonist has to be happening directly because of the antagonist. What the story needs is the influence of the antagonist, not the antagonist themselves.
Imagine that your protagonist is trying to make her way down a path in the forest in a deep, deep fog. Every step she takes, something gets in her way; first, it’s branches, which might seem like a natural thing for the environment, but they’re stacked pretty high. Then she comes across a pickup truck just blocking the path and she has to crawl over it. Then she hears what sounds like a bear, but it turns out to be coming from a bluetooth speaker just off the path, clearly meant to intimidate her. In the end, all of these things were put in the path by the antagonist deliberately to thwart her pursuit of her goal. We haven’t seen the antagonist, but as long as we feel their influence, we don’t need to see them or know who they are.
I’ve been making my way through Farscape lately, and while it was a bit of a slog to get through the first season… I’m not terribly Muppet-inclined… the show definitely had its moments. I’m well into the second season now, and it’s relaxed a bit. More trauma, fewer sex falls. I like it.
Today, I watched season 2, episode 18, “A Clockwork Nebari.” It was a decent episode, but at the end, there was a line that stuck with me.
Without spoilers, at the end, our dude-hero John Crichton finishes up a tense episode telling Chiana, a Nebari woman, that she can’t go see someone from her past.
Chiana: I want to go to him!
Crichton: I know, but since when do people like us get what we want?
I was really struck by this line, even though, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not an exceptional line. It’s what the line means that is such a punch to the gut; or, rather, two punches to the gut.
The first punch is ‘people like us.’ Every ensemble show is a family show. Some family, you just get; you’re born to them, you’re stuck in an office with them, or you’re stuck on a spaceship running from the same enemies with them. Others, you choose, because there’s some affinity of spirit between you.
But regardless, no matter what, you’ve got something in common with this group of people; you become, in essence, ‘people like us’ together. As individuals, you might have a lot of different traits, but you become one as a group. ‘People like us’ is about community, and the hunt for community and belonging is coded deep into human DNA. (And all sentient beings, even the ones that are textually alien or animal or android, represent some aspect of human experience.)
The second punch comes in with ‘since when do [we] get what we want?’
There are many levels to this sentiment. You can read it as angry, plaintive, petulant, whiny, defeated, and you’d have an argument for any of those reads. To me, I see John sitting with Chiana in her frustration and sadness; he is placing himself with her, aligning with her, being with her. He’s not telling her it’s going to be okay. He’s not giving her the bright side, telling her that maybe someday she’ll see the person she wants to go to. He is sitting with her in her grief, aligning with that grief, taking it on as his own so she is not alone.
There’s also a meta-level read of this; they are fictional characters, and fictional characters are always in pursuit of something. If they find it, the story is over. So that means that ‘people like us,’ i.e., fictional characters, are always leaning toward something they can never quite grasp. It’s because of us, because of me as a viewer, that they can’t have what they want. Because that’s how I need it in order for me to get what I need out of that story.
Whoops! I hit publish instead of schedule. Well... early post this week!