This week: Waiting for What? Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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Waiting
Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, accomplishes an improbable and amazing artistic feat. At first glance, it’s a two act play in which nothing happens. In fact, given the similarity between the two acts, nothing happens twice. To be fair, that’s not quite true. Estragon falls asleep. Twice. And Vladimir often departs the stage to urinate. So, things happen, just nothing consequential. Most important is what never happens: Godot never arrives, nor do we learn why anyone would care if he did.
None of this is what makes the play amazing. What’s amazing is that the play keeps the audience glued to their seats. Doubtless, they are also waiting for Godot, or something, to happen, but they are also fascinated and somehow satisfied when nothing does.
The play uses an ingenious mix of references—existential, Christian, even vaudevillian, to name a few—that hook the audience and engage the imagination. The audience can find action and even resolution from these hooks at will, but it’s unlikely that was Beckett’s intent. Instead, he asserted that they are literary devices only. Most probably, there’s an absurdist message here, grounded in Kierkegaard and Camus, that life’s ultimate questions can’t be resolved. Not by Vladimir and Estragon, and certainly not by Godot who never appears.
There can be no question that Samuel Beckett was a genius. With respect to Godot, he specifically said that the play was a game, an artifice and not supposed to be an imitation of reality. What the play does is provide a framework for the director, the actors, and the other members of the company, to breathe life into the dialogue. Various performances have emphasized post-war politics of the 1950s, or race, or even the sexuality of the characters. One aspect of Beckett’s genius is that the play is able to reflect many different realities.
For a novel or short story, all we have are the words on the page. There are no actors, no directors, no musicians. Not every play can be Waiting for Godot, and even fewer novels can or should be.
I’ve written elsewhere about structure for novels. I’ve also written about giving characters goals, obstacles, and stakes. Structure is all about the dynamics of the novel, how the fictional world changes over time. The conflict between goals and obstacles is about tension. But characters can change over time, too. As a novel’s plot can have an arc, so can a character’s evolution.
Some characters are static and unchanging. These have a flat character arc. A classic example would be Sherlock Holmes. He’s the same from start to finish in each of Conan Doyle’s novels. Indeed, he’s the anchor of the series. The same is true of Miss Marple, Hector Poirot, or even Columbo. There’s nothing wrong with characters having a flat arc. They can still be interesting and entertaining. Even Vladimir and Estragon are interesting, in an abstract and distant way.
But, more often than not, characters do change over the course of a novel. The nameless narrator of Rebecca transforms from a passive, frightened mouse to a fierce defender of her husband. In Heinlein’s Double Star, the narrator transforms from a shallow, narcissistic actor to a distinguished and selfless statesman. Harry Potter transforms from an ordinary boy living under a staircase to a world-saving wizard.
Character arcs can be transformational, as in the above, but they can also show the character growing without transforming to a new person with a new role in the world. Frodo is irrevocably changed by his experience with the One Ring, while Samwise Gamgee returns to the Shire, wiser and more experienced, but not totally transformed.
Not all characters experience growth arcs. Some undergo the reverse, falling from virtue to evil. In Breaking Bad, Walter White transforms from a hapless high school teacher to a power-mad drug lord through a sequence of bad decisions. Another example would be Anakin Skywalker’s transformation to Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. In The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale's fall from pious purity to corruption is another, early example of a downward character arc.
Character arcs are not the same as story arcs, although they can and often do overlap. Plot points in the three-act-play structure, for example, often will correspond to critical turning points in a character arc. Finding Nemo provides an example for more than one character arc.
Character arcs can add verisimilitude to your characters, add tension to the narrative, and structure to the story. Where your character starts, where they end, and how they have changed during the story are important considerations in constructing your novel. Since readers care about the characters more than about the plot, character arcs are often more important than the plot itself.
A successful novel will be about the characters acting and interacting. It’s about why they act and react, and how those actions change them and the world they inhabit. The inner life of the character is the amygdala of your novel. Understanding where the lizard part of the brain takes the character can transform your story.
Effectively drawn characters do more than wait for something to happen. They make things happen. Things happen to them and they react. The world isn’t a passive stage. It’s a merciless juggernaut with death at the end and the possibility of love and redemption along the way. Don’t keep your readers waiting. Share that ride with them in all its terrifying glory.
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For Authors: April 06, 2022 Issue [#11293]
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