Story Endings: A Witness to Vulnerability
One way to make a story with an observing main character more active is to put that character in a place, either a setting or with another character they don’t want to be in or around. If starting with an action doesn't serve the story, then we still need to find something that creates tension and delivers a story engine that keeps the reader engaged.
In “Boxing Day” by Rion Amilcar Scott, our young first-person narrator can hear the sound of his father punching a bag in the basement. This main character, the son, knows that “Daddy’s pissed…The Louder the sound, the more pissed he’s become.” Empathy often helps create tension, and we empathize with a child who wants to stay away from their angry parent, but our narrator has been told by his mother a demand has been put upon him “…to descend into his Hades to deliver a message.” There is no action to start the story, but here, the mother creates an escalation and creates the story's occasion. Our main character must do something he doesn’t want to do, something he knows better than to do, but a character with more power has made a demand/request that our character can’t disobey. Finding ways to put your characters in situations they can’t run from will add tension and velocity to your stories and help you find the right moment to dramatize in your character's life.
Flash writer Randall Brown says he “search[es] for the defining moment, the one that renders all the other moments unnecessary because that moment has the power to represent them all.”
But our narrator wants us to know that they are familiar with this part of their father’s life, so they give evidence as to why they want to avoid him and why the mother’s request creates conflict, creating a problem for our main character.
Notice how Scott uses white space to move our main character, to keep the importance and weight on the interaction with the father, and not the details of descending the stairs that we might expect. In fact, our narrator is wiser already about his father’s moods and how they scorch the narrator if he gets too close. This isn’t a story of change as much as it is a story of the narrator’s observations, of the narrator’s understanding, of how he wants to avoid the father, but he can’t. So there’s physical tension, the idea of being near someone being violent, and the emotional tension, of wanting to escape, of thinking you already know your father, and not wanting anything to do with what you know, and here is the window for Scott to flip our narrator’s expectations and our own, as we and the main character get to witness a subtle, but new vulnerability shone by the father.
“Then he’s Tyson whimpering after losing to Buster Douglas.
His whimpering stops being a joke and crosses over into real tears, his face a rain-slicked street at midnight. He leans into the bag like Tyson leaned into Don King after his loss to Douglas. I rarely saw my dad embrace my mother the way he’s hugging that bag. I don’t know whether to turn and tiptoe back upstairs or to go to him, hug him in the way he says men are not to hug.”
A pause here for the narrator to wonder, to consider his choices. In this pause, the story becomes more about the main character than the father. The father’s vulnerability is the window toward a possible new understanding for the main character, a chance for a small subtle, reckoning, but our narrator stays on script, follows the usual pattern, and only says “Dad.” The moment when the entire power dynamic could have crumbled, when the narrator might have taken that chance and hugged his father, is gone. Maybe the narrator doesn’t realize the opportunity implied here, but we do, and stories can end with dramatic irony. They can end where the reader has the reckoning, the insight, the understanding that the character can’t obtain, even though the opportunity was right in front of them.
“When our eyes meet, he squares his slumped shoulders and throws a weak set of punches at the bag.
“Tyson in ’91,” he says. “Good impression, huh?” He wipes his tears with his forearm and punches the bag again and again and again.”
The father is given the last action, the last word. He gets to return the world to the way it was in the beginning, but there’s been a shift; there are tears now, tears that the main character has witnessed, and that can never be taken back. There’s too much history and too much of a power dynamic for the son to create change in the father, but there is still something new here; a new vulnerability has been witnessed. And sometimes, all we can do is be a witness to the humanity of others.
Prompt:
Start the story with a main character who knows not to go near another character but is forced to do that anyway, either by circumstance or by a demand/request from another character. Allow the main character to provide a sense of context/evidence as to why they don’t want to go near this other character. Make it richly detailed and or provocative. Make us feel the tension here, to have empathy for a main character who wants to avoid confrontation. Allow that confrontation to occur. What small, subtle way can you show the shift in the power dynamic? How can you let vulnerability in for the antagonist or the main character? In what ways can you imply to the reader this vulnerability of this shift even if the main character doesn’t see it, understand it, or feel it?
Flash Favorites:
Pete’s Tie Quilt by Melissa Ostrom
It’s About the Size of a Clenched Fist by Richie Zaborowske
A Dirty Moss of Green by Karen Crawford
Lights by Stuart Dybeck
Try This At Home:
Can you write an opening fat with a setting, a stage these characters can act on? Consider places or locales that are unique or unexpected. Try to place your character in a slanted setting, a place that doesn't quite work in reality or a place where objects or images don't go together, but here they do. Or think of a place that used to exist as something else, but it's been transformed for better or worse.
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