Connection Part III: Loss, Home, Hope
By Donald Maass | June 7, 2023 |
When stories reach across time and still speak to us, something important is happening. We are connecting. No matter how different the era, place or events are from our own we nevertheless recognize that the story that we’re reading is our story too. It is the story of our fears, hopes and dreams. It’s the story of us.
As we’ve discussed in the first two parts of this series, simply put the universal element that creates story timelessness is human experience. That’s what makes the connection. Whether it is a princess locked in a castle tower, a social climbing bootlegger trying to win a woman above his station, or an airman trapped in a war impossible to escape, we see ourselves. We get it. In one way or another, we’ve been there. Or might be. Or fear to be. Or hope to be.
That’s true whether the intent of a story is high adventure or literary realism. Heightened events and ineluctable authenticity are flip sides of the same coin. They are the context for the melting and melding of ourselves and the story that we’re reading. We project ourselves into protagonists; protagonists are our mirror. They are whom we dread, whom we wish to be, and whom we really are. Play it any way that you like, but if we your readers are going to connect then in some way, heightened or humble, we will have to discover ourselves in your story.
Genre stories enact our experience of mystery, romance, adventure, fear and journey. Literary fiction captures our living in ways beautiful, breathtaking, sad and splendid. Both purposes can fuse—as I discuss at length in Writing 21st Century Fiction—but neither is by itself what causes connection. The human experience that I’m talking about is independent of the type of story that you’re writing.
Certain experiences are common to us all and that is because they are emotional. We’ve all been challenged. We’ve all be disappointed. We’ve all been unfairly judged. We’ve all been overjoyed. There are hundreds—thousands—of specific ways in which universal human experience can be conjured. That is why so many different kinds of story can connect. However, there are a couple of experiences that are utterly fundamental to human existence and yet in manuscripts I run across them only rarely.
What I’m talking about are experiences that are intangible and yet real. They are sensations: of a state, of a place, and of a longing. Loss. Home. Hope. We all go through one, have a sense of the other, and cannot live without the third. We may avoid loss, leave home, or be without hope but those conditions are temporary. Loss is inescapable. Home is where we are from and to where we hope to return, perhaps, but more than that it represents safety. Hope is the air that we breathe; without it we are suffocating, if only inside.
To create connection for readers, it is worth creating these experiences on the page. But how?
Practical Universality
I’m not a believer in formulas. Not for writing fiction. However, today I’m going to break my rule and invite you to use three templates. Create three paragraphs. Each is designed to capture one of the intangibles that are our topic today. I’ve presented versions of these templates in recent workshops and the results have been pretty good. So, if you have a few minutes give these a try.
First, loss. There are lots of ways to describe grief but one characteristic of that awful feeling is the awareness of what is missing and gone. To get at that, let’s detail not the void but what used to fill it. Start by thinking of a loss—whether of a person or anything else—but focus on the things that were good. Put each into a sentence beginning with the phrase there would be no more…
- There would be no more days when…
- There would be no more reminders like…
- There would be no more anticipation of…
- There would be no more discoveries such as…
- There would be no more laughter when…
- There would be no more comfort from…
- There would be no more peace because…
Then simply name the person or thing: There would be no more X.
Finally, add what is left in place of X: There was only Y.
Take a little time. String together the details that you’ve come up with which describe what was. End the paragraph with those two simple statements of loss. Have a look. Does the paragraph capture the sensation of loss?
Next, home. This time, let’s approach the sensation through the details of what make home what it is—or was. Where is, or once was, home for your protagonist? Fill in the following sentences, using X, Y and Z as things specific to your protagonist’s home:
- Home is where… (…a happy thing X happens)
- Home is where… (…a wonderful food Y is prepared)
- Home is where… (…a caring person X…) (…always does…) (…Y)
- Home is where… (…protagonist first…) (…did X) (…and Y) (…and Z)
- Home is where… (…something beautiful X is found)
- Home is where… (…there is always X)
String your sentences together and then conclude your paragraph with one of two capper sentences: Home was still there, but was now so far away. Or, Home was gone for good and would never be there again.
Lastly, hope. For this paragraph, too, let’s construct a list using the same device of anaphora. Thinking of your protagonist, what for him, her or they will be the good life and a world that might someday be possible:
- Someday there would be… (…laughter at X)
- Someday there would be… (…food tasting like Y)
- Someday there would be… (…music sounding like Z)
- Someday we will… (…dress in garments X)
- Someday we will… (…sing songs of Y)
- Someday we will… (…believe again in Z)
- Someday there will be… (…a person X waiting with open arms)
- Someday there will be… (…a memorial to Y)
- Someday there will be… (…no more Z)
Now, craft your paragraph and finish it with this sentence: That will happen someday, but today is not that day. Okay, take a look. Does that paragraph capture a feeling of hope?
Conclusion
The paragraphs that I’ve invited you to create may feel intentionally constructed. You may worry that they look mechanical. That’s okay. They don’t have to go into your manuscript. On the other hand, do those paragraphs capture sensations that we all might recognize as part of our human experience? I suspect that they do.
If those paragraphs work, it’s probably because of the specifics that you included. Also because of the rhetorical trick that I built into those templates, anaphora. Literary devices have an elevating effect. Language is there to be used and in manuscripts I wish that words were more often used artfully.
Loss, home and hope are sensations that come coupled with emotion. They are heart experiences that we all have. They’re not the only ones, of course, but they’re big ones. Universal ones. Used well, they reach across time, places and story types. They say something about all of us. They tell us who we are. They connect.
What are primary universal experiences that you value, or that you have discovered in your favorite timeless works of fiction?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
Loss, home, hope– ah, Don, you remind me of one of my favorite pieces of literature, Kalidasa’s “The Cloud Messenger.” Kalidasa was, more or less, the 4th-5th century AD equivalent of Shakespeare, in Sanskrit.
It’s one of those things that really has no reason to work, since, you know, there’s no plot, and everything in it is a foregone conclusion. What happens? Dude talks to a cloud. Will the cloud deliver the message to the guy’s wife? Nope, because, as previously stated, it’s a cloud.
But Kalidasa takes that particular set of feelings and personifies them, and the result is completely charming–
A certain yaksha, careless in his duties,
lost his powers through his master’s curse.
It was to be suffered for a year,
and separation from his sweetheart
made it unbearable.
He took to living in the hermitages on Rama’s mountain,
their waters sanctified by Sita’s bathing,
their trees giving lovely shade.
After he had spent many months
on the mountain apart from his lady,
that loving husband’s gold bracelets slipped off,
leaving his forearms bare.
Then, on the last day of Ashadha,
he saw clinging to the mountaintop
a cloud looking like an elephant
stooping playfully to butt a bank of earth.
Somehow managing to stand
before the bringer of blossom to the ketaka tree,
the servant of the king of kings
was lost in thought for an age,
holding back his tears.
At the sight of a cloud,
the mind of even a happy man takes a turn–
how much more so a man at far remove
longing for an embrace!
With the month of Shravana approaching,
he wished to give succor
to his sweetheart’s existence.
Hoping that the cloud would carry news of his well-being,
he welcomed it with an offering of fresh kutaja flowers
and greeted it gladly
in a voice full of fondness.
A cloud is a conglomeration
of vapor, light, water and wind,
and messages must be conveyed
by living beings with keen faculties.
Ignoring, in his enthusiasm, this incongruity,
the yaksha made a request to the cloud–
those consumed with love
petition the sentient and the dumb
indiscriminately.
(etc.)
Anyway, the result is completely charming, and kicked off an entire genre of poems like this, some featuring homesick lover, and others with something more elevated and spiritual. Much fun.
You know, I was thinking of that same Sanskrit poem! Seriously, that poem illustrates the principle that universal human experiences reach out across time. Thanks for that!
A primary universal experience I value is intimacy. It can be both physical and intangible. Another experience, that I don’t value but I find fascinating, is self-delusion/denial.
Your use of anaphora reminded me of a Bob Dylan song called Most of the Time. He uses the phrases Most of the Time and I Can repeatedly. It’s a haunting song of self-delusion/denial of a lost love.
Thanks for the post.
Not only that, Bob Dylan confessed to John Mellencamp that he wrote the same four basic songs over and over again. Doesn’t sound like that to me, but a musician would know. Thanks for your comment.
Reminds me of City Slickers (my husband met the screenplay author – an octogenarian security gate guard).
Curly:
Do you know what the secret of life is? [points index finger skyward] This.
Mitch:
Your finger?
Curly:
One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean sh*t.
Mitch:
But, what is the “one thing?”
Curly:
[smiles and points his finger at Mitch] That’s what you have to find out.
Thanks for the post Don.
My Daughter Haylie is graduating High School this week, and I’ve been reflecting on her growing up and my own continuing development. One timeless experience is that unnerving feeling that you’ve missed out on some part of life. I think this was best described in Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
“Something didn’t get done. I shouldn’t be here. I ought to be wandering around the world instead of sitting here on a good farm looking for a wife. There is something wrong, like it didn’t get finished, like it happened too soon and left something out. It’s me should be where you are and you here. I never thought like this before. Maybe because it’s late – it’s later than that. I just looked out and it’s first dawn. I don’t think I fell off to sleep. How could the night go so fast?”
The late great Jack Palance.
Love that movie.
Laura: Just one thing, eh? If discovering the secret of life is that easy, then why hasn’t somebody already told us?
James: “There is something wrong, like it didn’t get finished, like it happened too soon and left something out.” Love that Steinbeck passage! Many thanks!
In children’s literature, these intangibles seem to be evergreen themes. Sometimes they are all included in the same story.
Indeed! As well as the use of anaphora.
Don, thank you for these exercises. They’re helping me to capture emotions in a short story I’m working on. I’ve been thinking more about the love/hate between parents and children. We are born and raised in a family and how we feel about them at various stages. My mother died young. My father is 95 yrs old. So many mixed feelings. There are no perfect parents (except for St. Joseph and Mary, but then they did have the Perfect Child :)
Oh, I have perfect children too! (Excuse me while I stop laughing.) Parental love, hate, and regret is an eternal human experience for sure.
I’m always moved when a character gets crippled by fear or recognizes their own inadequacies but does the hard thing anyway. The wallowing usually involves a lot of unpleasant physical sensations, but that moment of breaking through always inspires me. I have a sign over my workspace that says ‘the Universal is in the specifics.” Your post today echoes this for me. And your anaphora made me think of Shakespeare. “In such a night…” I love reading your posts before I start the days work. Thank you!
You’re welcome!
I’m inspired by “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s all about loss, hope and home.
Excellent column, thank you.
Yes, exactly! Follow the Yellow Brick Road. Click your heels three times and say, “There’s no place like home.” There’s a reason that story (and movie) speaks to us across time.
It may be a reflection of my glass-half-empty personality, but I think loss is such an important tool for a writer. It can provide a character with motive (vengeance for the person lost) It can increase the stakes (if he doesn’t get this contract, not only will he lose his job, but his wife will leave him.) It can define heroism (the willingness to lose something important in order to do the right thing–and, yes, I’m thinking in this instance of a certain uncle that didn’t exist in the manuscript prior to BONI ;-) )
All good elements, yet I would distinguish the universal human experiences that I’m talking about today from backstory wounds and burdens, fear of loss as motivation, and doing the right/hard thing at the end. Those are all good story factors by themselves don’t necessarily bring the connection quality. If they did, then every protagonist with a backstory, motivation and a climactic heroic action would stand the test of time. But that’s not true.
Hi Don, home is a major theme in my WIP…you have read some of it…When The Cottonwoods Blew
She would not reveal to him that in these last hours, she’d heard Sarah whisper, ‘I’ve got you, you’re mine’, and then she knew her missing child still loved her, with all her Mama flaws. And Sarah would find her way back—to their home, to Starwood, her willow tree. But again, the hospital, the separation myth when working with a patient…it didn’t apply, Ella craving involvement, to help, always comfort. A nurse could separate from a patient, but not from her child.
A sense of home is a powerful connector, so however you evoke it is good.
During the seventies, the Findhorn community of Scotland was my Shangri-La beacon of New-Age perfection, so far out of reach, as to be impossible to reach for a Canadian teenager sent overseas to an English art college, other than a wishing on a star.
But I first encountered the ideal sanctuary of home at age six, reading ‘The Wind in The Willows’ when Moley returns home by instinct, following the scent of his lost burrow through the wildwood, and in ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ where Lucy meets the faun Tumnus, and experiences a welcome pocket of respite from the wintry blast of Narnia with a roaring fire, hot buttered toast, and sardines.
I confess here to being a committed pluviophile, which is to say, I am addicted to the sound and smell and the wetness of rain, notably enhanced by umbrellas (which I collect). This is likely why I gift the characters I love best, shelter from elemental storms. And possibly why I like sardines so much. Comfort food, inclement weather, and cozy shelter can simplify yet elevate home to the bliss of drinking cocoa by a fire in the dark.
Moving on, forty years after a remarkable series of serendipities, I was delivered from pressing business to a timeless sacred space.
I awoke in Findhorn the owner of a tiny cottage as cozy and fanciful as a hobbit’s hole. My ‘living room’ could barely hold an armchair, a bookcase, and a charming electric fire that glowed red as the banked embers of fake coal. A light bulb in the works behind a rotating disc made the ‘fire’ flicker. It evoked both primal hearth and candlelight.
During my Findhorn escape year, I was repeatedly startled by the realization: I AM IN FINDHORN. I AM HOME. I AM HERE, particularly stronger when rain sheeted down, and muffled thunder, precisely far away enough to be peaceful rather than crashing, was music to my ears.
Being transported home to Shangri-La arrives in peak moments of reality and fiction.
My most profound experience came on a rainy evening in Findhorn, Scotland, when after being wind-howled, rain-pelted, and rumbled by thunder, I experienced Moley’s bliss. And I knew it as surely as Bridget Jones knew the precise moment when her life changed at a turkey curry buffet.
What a stirring reflection, Veronica. We just came back last month from a perfect week and a half at the Isle of Iona (and Oban), Scotland. I worked 2 years with the Iona Community and loved being outdoors, the quick change from clouds and rain to wind and sun, and always the water breaking on white sands and dark rocks.
“…a roaring fire, hot buttered toast, and sardines.” As Meat Loaf sang, two out of three ain’t bad. Sardines?
Seriously, Findhorn sounds amazing! You make me want to go there.
If Mr. Tumnus had heard of turkey curry, C.S. LEWIS’s book may have turned out very differently. *Sardines mashed with plenty of vinegar and black pepper served on toast was an English teatime specialty in my childhood.
Just to get farther off the track, I remember my father’s treat to himself of canned, smoked sardines—packed in oil—on saltine crackers, without embellishments. If you like it, it’s good.
Thank you for this Don. I’ve been trying to sharpen the emotional impact of my protag’s incident/reaction/reflection that incites her on arc and plot in relation to hope and home. After watching Encanto, reading Nathan Bransford’s post about “I want” songs, and now your post here…it all helps.
Ooo, Encanto…I have a complex reaction to that animated film. I love the cultural flavor, the enchanted house, and especially the song “We Don’t Walk About Bruno”. (Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda.) It all worked beautifully, until the end. Mirabel gets her magic through no particular effort or cost on her part. Alma imposed a burden on the family, doing harm–she’s the villain, really, but has no comeuppance. It all ends happily mainly…well, mainly because it’s time to end happily. If it were my screenplay, I would have had Mirabel blow out the flame and put an end to the family lies!
Sorry, you got me going. There’s another genre of songs that I think are useful to consider, ones that essentially state, “I am…”
Don, you proved your point for me in the enumeration of the losses; just “there will be no more days when” took me away to that emotional flush. And as you suggest, we should be wary of templates and formulas, but some messages like that little list broad-jump templating and land square in the belly. Good stuff to probe for in the writing.
Yeah, templates generally are not my teaching style, but in this case it seemed a good way to dig out the specifics of loss, home and hope. Glad that prompt worked for you. It gets to me too.
Terrific exercise, Don! It makes you drill down to the honest details and experiences of life that with variations, are common to everyone. Reading your prompts using anaphora, I couldn’t help but think of certain books of the Old Testament, the promise of eternal happiness and the end of earthy suffering. And that’s going back over 2,000 years.
The Bible has connected with people for a very, very long time, it’s true!
Just used your exercises tonight and it opened up something for the protagonist that moved me past a place where I was stuck. Your exercises always seem to do that… thanks!
Excellent! That’s great to hear.
This post is definitely a keeper to be read over and over again. I’ve been learning from you for over 20 years, and you continue to deliver. Thank you.
Thanks so much for that, glad my posts have been helpful.
Thanks again for sharing a great post. Will definitely use the exercises to develop my protagonist,
a widow afraid of losing memories of her husband. Doing that without becoming too maudlin is the tricky part.
Another universal human experience I’ve been thinking about lately is resistance to change. Often it’s a mix of fear, nostalgia, and the toddler in us who wants a predictable schedule. Heather Webb’s recent post here talks about a positive way to respond to change: https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2023/05/25/the-secret-to-winning-in-publishing/. It’s still hard, as shown by all the fretting about AI. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a good example of resistance to change, ways to deal with change, and what happens if you don’t.