The Flip Side
By Kathleen McCleary | April 17, 2019 |
Flickr Creative Commons: Mel Trent
Recently I was talking to a friend about her mother’s death. Losing a parent—especially the only parent you had left—sends the world spinning off its axis. It can feel like a free-fall into grief. “But it’s also liberating,” my friend said. “Is that an awful thing to say?” The answer is no, because it’s true. While parent/child relationships are often complicated (my God, what would we all write about if human relationships were straightforward and easy?), the death of a parent brings enormous loss. We lose the buffer between ourselves and our own mortality; we lose a generation and the values and events and memory that shaped them; we lose the individual who shaped us, for better or for worse.
But it’s also liberating. Suddenly we are free to be and do things completely apart from our parents’ expectations or rules or hopes or disappointments. We are different people without our parents, no matter how young or old we are when we lose them. We can serve tapas on Christmas eve instead of roast beef, move to a different house or different town or different job or different relationship, take up the hobby Dad thought was a waste of time and money, go on the trip Mom worried was too risky. Those are just the obvious, external examples. How a parent’s death frees us to BE someone different is yet another piece of the story.
And this proverbial two-edged sword—we lose, we gain—is at the heart of writing fiction. It’s the key to character, because every character is both good and bad. It’s the key to plot, because every obstacle offers an opportunity to conquer that obstacle, to face down a challenge or a fear. And it’s the key to story, because every compelling story involves a win and a loss.
As you write, think about the flip side of your character and your story. Maybe your character is a young woman who’s calm and emotionally balanced and poised under pressure, the rock of her family. But there’s a flip side to all that stability, too. Maybe she can’t empathize with her husband or brother or the child who feel things more intensely than she does, so her relationships are distant, a step removed from real intimacy. You can find this duality in Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Less, featuring a mild-mannered, polite, not very successful middle-aged protagonist who seems to let life sweep him up in its currents and carry him along. He’s soft-spoken, innocuous, not memorable. Yet he has an innocence, a kindness, and a sweetness that make him unforgettable, and that lead those around him to act in remarkable ways.
The flip side is critical for antagonists, too. I play a game called “Monster Confessions” in the creative writing workshops I teach to kids, in which I ask kids to write a monologue from a bad guy’s point of view. I’ve had students write “confessions” by the big bad wolf, by Harry Potter’s Professor Quirrell, by Jugo, the bad guy in a Japanese Manga series. What I love about all of their essays is the way the students manage to find the common thread of humanity in every villain, the vulnerability or wound that is the flip side to all that evil.
Think about the flip side as you write your scenes. Maybe your character is facing an obstacle that you know he will surmount by doing XYZ. But what if you turn that around? How would it change your story or your character if he couldn’t overcome that particular obstacle? What would happen next?
Exploring the two sides that are part of every story can be unsettling, to readers as well as writers. One of the characters in my third novel was a mother (Rita) who was indifferent at best, and dangerously irresponsible at worst. Yet, she ended up providing some insight and perspective when her adult daughter became entangled in a mess of her own making. “I ended up liking Rita,” one of my friends said to me after reading the book. “Was I supposed to like Rita? I didn’t want to like her.” Exactly.
What’s your main character’s flip side? What’s your antagonist’s flip side? How do you deal with exploring both sides in your stories?
[coffee]
Kathleen McCleary is the author of three novels—House and Home, A Simple Thing, and Leaving Haven—and has worked as a bookseller, bartender, and barista (all great jobs for gathering material for fiction). A Simple Thing (HarperCollins 2012) was nominated for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards. She was a journalist for many years before turning to fiction, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and USA Weekend, as well as HGTV.com, where she was a regular columnist. She taught writing as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and teaches creative writing to kids ages 8-18 as an instructor with Writopia Labs, a non-profit. She also offers college essay coaching (https://thenobleapp.com), because she believes that life is stressful enough and telling stories of any kind should be exciting and fun. When she’s not writing or coaching writing, she looks for any excuse to get out into the woods or mountains or onto a lake. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters and Jinx the cat.
I clearly recall the guilt over the relief I felt when my mom passed. We’d been caring for her in the house we grew up in, but that was becoming increasingly untenable. And we had no easy alternatives. My sister (who attended to so many of the day-to-day issues) and I have since spoken about the relief. The heaviness of what we’d been going through was only apparent through having it cease. Even the conversation made us feel guilty.
Truly a life-flip, for both of us. But not without a price. Thanks much for the insight and perspective, Kathleen.
Thanks for the comment and for your honesty, Vaughn. Those complexities and dualities are the emotional truth that makes fiction really resonate with readers. Because they’re TRUE. I’m sorry about the loss of your mom.
Kathleen,
Thanks for such a insightful post. When I think about the flip side, it could some quality or weakness that is linked to the protagonist’s goals. The protagonist might be someone who is shy and it is holding him back. To change, he must be challenged and pushed outside his comfort zone. In some sense, I think we all have a secret desire to turn our weaknesses into strengths, our flaws into virtues. What we really must be aware of as writers is to draw characters who are multi-dimensional. Yes, every strong character in fiction must have two sides (or more), as you have so well pointed out. Thanks again for this post.
Hi, CG. Yes, exactly—those weaknesses or character flaws are so often what holds the character back, and are exactly the thing we all long to change or burst free from in our own lives. That’s a lot to convey in fiction, but it’s worth the effort. Good luck with your writing!
Kathleen, yes, yes, yes, to everything you said. My sister and I took care of our mom when she was dying and because she suffered so much, we were both relieved. It was short though–just 4 mo. from diagnosis to death, but because my sister came to help me, she had to leave her husband to fend for himself and those 4 mo. seemed very long to him. They were living in Greece at the time so it wasn’t an easy decision to make. She brought her little daughter with her, who brought us so much joy.
In my novel, Bound, two sisters are bound together by their love but the one sister also resents it because she wants to be free. When the one is more dependent says, “I’ll always be there for you,” the other thinks that it’s exactly she’s afraid of.
We really do struggle to love our neighbor well, no? If we didn’t we’d all be saints! Thanks for a wonderful essay.
Hi, Vijaya. I’m sorry for your mother’s suffering, even if it was brief. How fortunate that you sisters could pull together although, as you point out, everything comes with a cost. I love the way you’ve taken some of those hard-earned insights from your own experience and poured them into your fiction—that’s exactly what I try to do when I write.
Best of luck. Always good to hear from you.
Kathleen
Hi Katheleen,
You touched an important cord in my life and in my writing. My mother was awesome, but with dementia life changed. I was there for her, driving back and forth from Iowa to Chicago as she gradually decided to leave us. My brother and I were at her bedside. What a blessing. I think we all drift for a while, then regroup and find something strong and vibrant to remember, to help with the future. Writing does that for me. I wrote a story for my MOTHER’S TIME CAPSULE collection entitled WHEN DID MY MOTHER DIE? Because though mortality is real, mothers in many ways never leave us. Thanks for this thoughtful post. Beth
Hi, Beth. What a journey you had with your mother–thanks for sharing that. I love your idea that we drift then regroup then find something positive to latch on to, and love the example you mentioned about how you’ve used that in your own writing. Thanks.
Kathleen
I have had a lot of readers comment that they like my villain. Part of it must be that I have taken the same amount of care with all three main characters, including her, while maintaining a ratio where the main character gets the most scenes, and the villain the fewest.
Balance is important. The villain is pivotal in the story – without her it wouldn’t happen – but she has to be more one-note because of her role. It has been fun to write her.