Types of Story Currents, Continued

Eddies

An eddy is a current that swirls around in one place. It can pull you in and literally send you spinning. It neither hones nor helps.

Bear with it long enough, and it carries you all around the circle. You can ride it and look for your moment to exit. Navigating an eddy requires finesse.

Of all the story currents, this is the most challenging. It’s also the most interesting. The eddy is often the heartbeat of the story. It gives the story life. It makes the story real.

What causes an eddy in a story?

In the natural world, eddies are created by an obstruction, hidden beneath the surface of the water, which changes the usual flow of the current.

In a story, you also have a hidden obstruction, and it takes the form of a very specific type of question. The questions that cause eddies all do the following:

• They are the type of question that the character/individual can spend their whole life answering.

• They drive the interior growth of the character/individual.

• The character/individual’s answer to this question changes over time, and the changes between those answers demonstrate the character/individual’s growth.

Many stories spiral around one of these questions. The flow of the story, much like the moving water, doesn’t change. The question, like the obstacle in the way, doesn’t change. The answers differ every time, because each experience teaches you something new.

What makes an eddy different from a honing current?

The honing current is always moving against the individual/character, and the only way to overcome it is to grow in strength.

The eddy swirls. It helps some. It hones some. The best way to work with it is to grow in skill. Sometimes, you’ll need muscle. Sometimes, you’ll only need better timing. It’s usually an internal growth that leads to the right external action.

In all these stories, one helping current is my compassion for those who are grieving. Another honing current is my recognition that this made me different from those around me. The combination made me question: “Does my empathy bring me closer to other people, or does it separate me from other people?”

That snag is what the story eddies around. By bringing that question to each section, you get a separate and distinct answer for each story:

1. In the story with the librarian, my openness around my mother’s grief, marked me as different. I was the only student whose story was interrupted, so the librarian made me aware of my difference.

2. In the story at Sunday School, witnessing Mark’s grief—and overcoming my resistance to acknowledging that grief—also separated me from the rest of the class, which was giving him space. But this action brought me closer to two people: Mark, of course, but also the version of myself that I wanted to grow to be.

3. In the story of family dinner, I had accepted that I was different from most people, because I acted on my empathy for those grieving. During this conversation, I realized that I was in good company: my mother and my sister were the same as me. The person most like the rest of the culture, my dad, was actually the outsider in the situation, because my mother, sister, and I co-created a subculture of our own: we saw grief. We spoke of it. The three of us each acted separately, to help those grieving as best we could, but we were united the way we approached it.

Each answer is unique to that particular event, but because the currents are the same, you can see that each of the answers is also a piece of the answer to a bigger question, one that all good stories answer: What growth has taken place?

How necessary are eddies to storytelling?

A honing current will trigger character growth which is interesting to the reader. You have to have one, or otherwise, you won’t keep your readers’ interest.

An eddy will trigger character growth which is relatable to the reader.

Eddies are actually the story’s theme. You can write a story without an eddy—i.e. without at theme. In my opinion, those stories tend to feel shallow and forgettable. Plenty of stories only contain helping and hoping currents. Eddies create more depth to the stories and to the characters within them.

That may feel daunting, especially if you’re young. When I was a young writer, I struggled with theme the most. This was mainly because I hadn’t yet learned how to identify the eddies in my own life. Once I did, I became more skillful first in recognizing story currents in my own life and then in the people around me. Then, I naturally developed the skill to put those same ingredients in my fiction.