By Kris Kennedy
The thing that can’t be undone. Ringing the bell that can’t be unrung. It means you’re committed. In for the long haul. The act, however unconsidered it was at the start, is now binding.
I believe this is one of the things we seek in our stories. Oh, it’s among other things, of course. But one of the reasons great fiction moves us is because we see characters doing things that we ourselves often back away from: being irrevocable. Doing the thing that can’t be undone.
For good or ill, that’s one of the most exciting parts of reading—and writing—fiction.
It’s part of the reason why the characters in novels don’t do the mundane tasks of their lives on stage. Things like cleaning the house don’t matter, in terms of Story. (Did you hear that? Just tell your family cleaning the toilet doesn’t have a fundamental turning point within, so you’re giving it up.) Most of the mundane tasks of daily life are revocable. Nothing ‘turns’ on them. You could take them back, and no one would know or care. Nothing is fundamentally different as a result. They’re forgettable.
They never make a difference.
(In fact, cleaning is the the antithesis of irrevocable. At least in my house.)
You can walk away from a clean OR a dirty toilet. That is…unless you found a diamond ring resting there, after you’d pushed back the hair from your sweaty forehead with a forearm and knelt to scrub your 20th toilet of the week. And then you saw it. Sparkling. A diamond ring. Diamond rings don’t grow in toilet bowls, so that means someone lost it. Or tossed it. And you found it. And your rent is a month overdue.
NOW you have a story. Now you have a protagonist. Someone with a choice to make.
Make the right ones and you have a hero. Or a heroine.
In all our ‘keeper’ books, one of the things we generally find is characters actively getting themselves deeper and deeper into worse and worse trouble, particularly with the hero/heroine, and there’s simply no backing out. Nothing they do can be reversed.
Sometimes this is hard for us as authors. We like our heroes and heroines. We know their histories, their full potential and their pathetic pitfalls. We love them. Or at least really like them.
In any event, we want them to have a happy life. We don’t want them to be thrown to the wolves. To feel despair. To have Dark Nights of the Soul. To say ‘no’ when it’d be safer to say ‘okay, fine.’ To walk the plank. To face the witch in her very own castle, surrounded by guards, with nothing but a scarecrow to protect them.
But we’ll do it.
For you, the reader.
Because in the end, we’re storytellers. We know heroes and heroines have to walk through the fire. Happy, easy things happening to nice, good people, all of which can be taken back at the first sign of discomfort, is not drama.
Drama means conflict. And that means being committed. Doing, at least once, something that cannot be undone, ever.
Check out the books on your ‘keeper’ shelves. I’ll bet you can find at places the characters made irrevocable, un-take-back-able choices. Decisions that, even if done in the spur of the moment—especially if done in the spur of the moment—pushed them closer to the dark edge of What They Known, then straight off the cliff, into peril and danger and their own worst fears. Right in the other person’s arms.
Come share a moment of irrevocable choice in a book you’re reading or have read. A classic or an unknown. And to the writers out there, how about from a story you’re writing? Why does that moment feel powerful to you, as the reader? What is irrevocably different after that choice, and why do you think it makes the story better?
Or, if you could re-write a scene from a story you’ve read, to include an irrevocable choice, what would it be? Something they can’t take back, and will change everything to come after.
I’m giving away a copy of my latest release, THE IRISH WARRIOR, to someone who gives a great example of irrevocability in romance fiction!!
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