“Myth is the garment of mystery.”
– Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
Last week, Donald Maass posted one of his predictably fascinating and eminently useful posts on the subject of awe in fiction, and how to create “marker moments” within a story that, well, let me use his own words to state the matter:
Marker moments are not plot points. They are emotional points, though events and emotions inevitably entwine. The point is to create places on the page wherein there are shifts in inner perception, understanding, certainty, security, or any other internal state. When a marker moment occurs it’s as if an anchor has pulled up from the sea floor in a storm, or conversely like when a steel piton is driven into a cliff face during a rock climb. Characters—and readers–become in those moments unmoored or newly secure.
He used the metaphor of a cathedral to illustrate that feeling cannot be conjured from structural elements alone. The overwhelming sense awe we feel when entering Notre Dame or Chartres or any other great cathedral (and even some of the humbler but still awe-inspiring chapels one can encounter if one looks) cannot be attributed to the stone or the stained glass or the buttresses from which it is built. Again, let’s allow Don to state the matter for himself:
What is therefore important and worth working on…is not only the plot architecture but also what cannot be built out of stone: the many moments of recognition, understanding and empathy that for readers sum up to a profound and transforming experience of awe.
Don also provided a number of cues that can lead us to just such moments, some of which I think are ingenious, such as (to name only a handful–my favorites):
- Self-doubt becomes unbearable when…
- My protagonist’s greatest fear comes true when…
- The greatest betrayal is…
- What my protagonist denies and resists is…
- The harshest self-truth to accept is…
- The antagonist is right about…
There is much I consider both wise and practical in all of this—I especially believe that, by focusing on moments, we naturally envision scenes, and I have long contended that the most dramatically effective way to explore character, both through backstory and in the present-day dramatic arc of the novel, is by focusing on scenes, not narrative exposition or, worse, explanation.
I would add that the moments I typically search for are moments of helplessness or sudden, unexpected emotion or action when the character’s response goes beyond what their normal, day-to-day persona would have predicted. On the one hand, I look for moments of great fear, shame (loss of respect), guilt (harming others), betrayal, loss, sorrow, death; on the other I look for moments of sudden courage, pride, forgiveness, trust, and connection or love.
But the one thing this sort of analysis glances past is how do we ourselves as living, sentient beings come to feel awe? It is one thing to say we should conjure it in our stories. But how are we going to do that if we lack any means of knowing how to find it in our lives?
Worse, what if we resort to a mere device in the mistaken belief it will somehow magically conjure awe?
