What Helps, What Hones, and What Requires Finesse

We often call a character’s story within a larger story “a character arc,” but since no story happens in a vacuum, other elements beyond the story structure also impact the character’s journey. I think of them as “story currents.”

(Creative lineage credit goes to John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, which was taught to me by Professor Josh Harmon at Vassar College. My take is different—you can read about my reasons here.)

Anyone who has spent any time in water outside, in rivers, lakes, and oceans, usually gets a feel for currents. I personally learned a lot about currents in the six years I spent on rowing teams. My team practiced in the same spots, but the water—whether it was Lake Wylie or the Hudson River—was rarely the same two days in a row. You discover quickly that currents can feel chaotic and overwhelming until you learn to navigate their rhythms.

A current does not choose to push you off path or to help you along. They’re as impersonal as the weather—conditions, whether big or small, a little annoying or truly disruptive, are what they are, all much bigger than you.

An individual can only respond to them, whether skillfully or not-so-skillfully, in order to move through them. Learning to see story currents is one skill you need to navigate through them. Recognizing how many currents are present is another.

The Amount of Story Currents Present in a Story

Story currents grow more chaotic depending on how complex the story is.

In an anecdote (a story which is only a few paragraphs long), the story currents are often as simple as this:

However, as people who live near water know, currents are rarely so tidy and predictable. A character could move through myriad currents present in a more complicated way:

Complicated isn’t necessarily bad. Complicated can also mean interesting, especially since that kind of complexity mirrors life.

Types of Story Currents

Another skill you need to navigate these currents is to understand: what kind of current it is and what it does in the story. So, next, we’ll explore the kinds of currents. We’ll examine each one and find an example for each from “The Thread of Grief” story.

Helping Currents

Certain currents are already moving in the direction you want to go, and when you slide your boat into one, it takes you on a ride toward your destination.—You may use your boat’s oars to quicken the pace, but you are traveling with more speed than your boat can manage on its own. That is a “helping” current. 

The major helping current through all three stories is this: my mother’s honesty about her experience and the meaning she took from it.

Mom survived an enormously painful event when she lost her father, and as with all grief, the pain of loss has lasted much longer than the event itself. As kids, we noticed her pain, and we asked about it. She shared honestly: she told us what happened and what she’d learned about grief, what she’d read and how she’d integrated it.

How can you tell that this is the major helping current?

Consider what the story would be without this element:

1. I would have told a different story to my librarian and my classmates, and I probably wouldn’t have remembered that experience at all.

2. I wouldn’t have noticed the similarity between Mark’s situation and my mother’s, and I definitely wouldn’t have known what to do. I would have only been sad and uncomfortable like the rest of my classmates.

3. My mom, my sister, and I may have had the same experiences we discussed, but we wouldn’t have talked about them. I would have never noticed the similarities between us.

In other words, there wouldn’t have been much of a story here at all.

It wasn’t just my mom’s honesty. It was the bravery of her example. The root word of “courage” comes from coeur, “heart” in French. My mother’s particular brand of bravery is to stay in her heart and to show it to people, even young ones like her own children. That’s rare, though I didn’t recognize it until I grew older.

My mother was brave enough to show her heart in the middle of her grief. I accepted that as normal, and that’s the woman I chose to become.

Honing Currents

Other currents are moving in a direction different from where you want to go. It can run in the opposite direction, but not always. In a river, for example, if you’re moving upstream, that current often moves exactly opposite from the direction you’re headed in.

In the ocean, on the other hand, there are the waves and the tides. Beneath the surface, there are also ocean currents with more variety—sometimes, they just push you a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right of where you want to go.

Currents also vary in intensity. Sometimes, the current is so gentle that you barely notice it at first. Sometimes, the current is moving directly against you, and it’s much stronger than you are. Trying to fight a current like that would be as useless as fighting a riptide. You’re only going to exhaust yourself unless you surrender until the pressure lets up.

However, no matter what the intensity is, honing currents strengthen a skill or an ability that a character or an individual developing as they move through their story. For example, if you are rowing a boat upstream during practice, the current is pulling the boat in the opposite direction from your destination, ensuring you move slower than you would in still water. This is also actively strengthening your muscles and testing your endurance, honing the skills you’ll need on race day. That’s why they call it practice, and that’s why I call this a “honing current.”

Here’s an example of a honing current that runs through all three stories: our culture’s resistance to talking about grief. As a culture, we actually don’t like to talk about deep internal pain of all kinds, unless we’re telling a story about how we’ve already conquered that pain and how it didn’t stop us from accomplishing whatever we aimed to accomplish.

Those stories are okay, according to our larger culture.

The stories about grief are messier. Those say: This happened. Everything changed. I was never the same.

Those stories go straight to the heart, and influenced by our culture, most people find the heart a dangerous place to be. It’s also where we find the deepest healing—and with it, the most lasting change.

In this way, all stories about death are a great example of the interplay between external and internal story currents.