Writing by Numbers 2

by Adrian Glamorgan

Tradition has it that soon enough the unity of the university will split. The twos come in from every direction. There's time and space. Out of void springs heaven and earth, the ideal conflicts with material appetites. Who is striving? Who is resisting? Somewhere after your first word, and hopefully by the time you turn your first page, the golden age has ended, the trouble is away, and your reader can't stop reading until the finish.

The biggest duo is protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist, "first to contend for the prize," has to drive the story. You can try it differently: the hero being happily married and the kids perfect and the husband bringing flowers, doing back massages and washing the dishes, er...what's the story? (You might be into fantasy novels, but you didn't mean that sort.) Unless the protagonist is agonising over an inner struggle, all you've got is "this happened, then this happened" and - who cares? It's a random universe. You can explore all twelve notes of the octave, but we still like a good tune. Random doesn't do it for us.

So the protagonist drives the story. The protagonist's unity is broken off by some inner struggle, some wound that keeps them less than perfect. Spiderman is very talented but quite misunderstood. Miss Elizabeth is a fully independent woman but can't help looking Mr Darcy's way. Moses keeps finding tablets of commandment, yet turns away for a moment and his people are dancing to Baal. The hobbit's got the ring, but it does strange things to his personality and make other creatures want to slay him. Do you notice what's happening? The inner struggle has an outer manifestion. We call that outer manifestation: the antagonist. The protagonist provides the focus, and projects out the conflict onto the antagonist. You have a story.

The antagonist is not always another character. Shackleton dragging his sled across the ice mountains of Antarctica is battling with his own courage and stamina (inner struggle) but it's being tested by the landscape (antagonist.) The protagonist is not always hero, either. Your story can focus on the criminal who comes to a sticky end, so long as some inner struggle shows itself.

Warning: watch out for being two-dimensional. This is a bad thing. This is when the whole protagonist-drives-the-story-and-provides-the-antagonist deal is just too predictable. The moment the readers says, "typical" you've got yourself a stereotype, and that's not the sort of twosome you want. All the formulas are obvious. The goodie wears the white hat, the baddie wears the black. The handsome doctor crashes his just-new Porsche into the beautiful nurse's rusty vw, and they fight in the carpark. You know she'll be swooning on page 93. Never make it too impossible, nor too improbable. One hundred stormtroopers with photon lasers are not going to kill the one rebel with the cap gun. Never make it too symmetrical or obvious. Your character has ceased to be alive.

Now you're writing, enjoy yourself, but don't be fooled: out on the page is your own story, heavily disguised, made up to look prettier, smarter, and with better painted scenery, but somewhere in there is you working out your shadow and finding your higher self. So use the protagonist and antagonist to get real about where you're stuck. Write dangerous, so that your mother will cringe to read it. It's not about being offensive or not being offensive: it's about being vulnerable. You make yourself vulnerable by daring to hope when you're knee-deep in the mire of your own making. You need hope and mire for this to work.

You are in the land of twos. Two circles intersecting give the vesica piscis, or mandorla, the entry into story.

It takes two with guts to tango properly. Somebody's got to lead, and really lead. Someone's got to yield, yet never admit surrender. The protagonist and antagonist dance, back and fore, across the dance floor. The writer knows where next, but keeps it secret, holds the reader close, chests touching, the lips close. The writer looks past the reader's spellbound gaze, and hears the stopped breath, and keeps going. Keep going.

Try this:

1. Take a landscape, describe it, then invert it into an opposite landscape. Now hide the inversion: change both landscapes slightly, so they're not obviously symmetrical.
2. Take a mythic character or two (eg Odysseus or Penelope.) Portray them in a contemporary situation. Change an important character trait (eg Odysseus' cleverness or Penelope's patience) into some other quality. How does it change the character? How does it change the story?
3. Have a look at one of your own favourite pieces of writing. Can you spot your own higher self and shadow at work? Can you make the piece more dangerous? Try it.

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