🚀The Dark Age: Exercise 3, Exploration

Hello, friends!

In the last two Dark Age newsletters, I've shared exercises created by Nina LaCour, as samples of her Slow Novel Lab workshop. Today I'll share the last of those three, which is about rooting deep in a story to find the reasons characters do what they do.

Monday, April 13, 2020

The third exercise in Nina LaCour's worksheet is titled "Exploration," and it says, right up front: This is not to be saved; it's just for you right now. (And here's me, saving and sharing.) This exercise isn't about writing another scene. Instead, it proposes you interrogate your story, with the goal of uncovering something about it you didn't know before.

What is the story you're writing?

The Dark Age is about a family broken into pieces by the needs of a greater family, humankind. The members of the first family are trying to learn how to contend with and release their pain. They're trying to learn, in the face of their history, how to be.

What is the heart of the story?

The desire to be a better parent than your own parents were is certainly layered in there. To be more present, more understanding, more tender, more encouraging. It's an easy desire to lose your grip on: Philip and Frances become copies of their own parents. Circumstances have a way of taking your goals and stripping them away. The Depression. A world war or two. September 11th. A pandemic. For this family, the Argus mission is its own crisis. It turns them toward survival, and away from generosity. Philip's and Frances's goals collapse, and as a result, Elle is a child waylaid by circumstance. That her family has unraveled isn't her fault. It's on her, she discovers, to take up the same goal: To be better than her parents were. The world requires it of her.

What are your characters' essential wounds?

Philip believes he's abandoned his family. He realizes that the world regards him as a hero—him and all of his fellow crew members, the engine of this mission that will benefit all of humanity—but he doesn't see himself that way. As a child, he was abandoned by his parents, too. He knows what it means to leave your family, and he's repeated the cycle.

Frannie has a deep certainty that she is not worthy of love, that rejection is her gift. This, she thinks, explains why the agency removed her from the Argus mission, and why she's been grounded since. It's the reason she sabotages her relationships, even the one she has with her own child. Like Philip, Frannie was rejected by a parent; like Philip, she carries that sour torch forward, and doesn't know how to put it down.

Ellie, on the other hand, has been victimized by fate, her family sacrificed to the "greater good". Because the sacrifice was so great, complaining seems like poor form. So she is what she is: A girl who doesn't really know how to be part of a family. She worries that, as she ages, she'll carry those scars into parenthood. That she'll wound her own children, should there be any.

If your characters could tell a single defining story of their life, what would it be? Is that story true? Did they misunderstand it? Is there more to it?

Philip was raised by his grandparents. He was told his parents had died, but knew it to be a lie. His father disappeared; his mother couldn't hack single parenthood. Philip felt he was abandoned by anyone who cared, and so fears abandoning his own child. He fails to see that he was also chosen, by his grandparents.

As a child riding a city bus with her mother, Frannie would play among the seats. One day, after her mother told her to stop, Frannie continued to horse around, and caused an elderly man to fall and hurt himself. She rushed for comfort to her mother, who offered only blame. Ever since, Frannie has felt mistrust for those closest to her; she believes she has no safe place, and that everyone she loves will eventually betray her. It's why she's embittered by Philip's role in the Argus mission, and why she holds Ellie at arm's length. What Frannie doesn't see is that her mother was trying to teach her how to be responsible for her own actions, a lesson she'll continue to struggle with well into adulthood.

Ellie knows that the world needed heroes, and so it took her parents. Her story is entirely true: Her father ascended into the heavens, never to return; her mother descended into bitter grief. Ellie embodies both of her parents wounds. She has been abandoned by Philip; she has been betrayed by Frannie, the parent who remained. As a result, Ellie has to navigate her parents' histories, and make her own, with no help at all. It's what will make her a great human.

And that's the last of the three exercises of LaCour's worksheet. I hope it's been an interesting trip, peeking into the very early process of developing a story. It's interesting, too, for me to look back on this early work and realize how much of it has changed as the book grows. This sort of work is so valuable: Even if little of it sticks, it still permits me to examine facets of my characters or story that I haven't considered.