To write an engaging story, the sort that lives beyond the page and shows us what it means to be human, we must write compelling characters. I offer students building blocks in the form of a craft sheet, a fill-in-the-blank worksheet adapted from my former professor, Janet Peery.
Craft sheets arise from a revision of Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid, his visualization of narrative structure. Most students are familiar with the elements therein: rising action, climax, resolution. However, key adaptations to these traditionally-understood concepts can frame character-building as an act of resilience and wholeness, instead of flatness and paralysis.
First, consider the highest point of tension in the story. Instead of a “climax,” something that happens to the protagonist, we reframe it, referring to it instead as a “crisis action,” the final decision that the protagonist makes, one manifested in action.
Then we consider the resolution of the story. We aren’t looking for results or for the effects of fate’s impact; we’re looking for how the protagonist feels about their crisis action. In a truly resonant story, we expect conflicting emotions: the protagonist is proud and embarrassed at the same time, in grief but also utter peace, exuberant and a little doubtful. Emotional complexity is where we uncover the story’s meaning.
By identifying crisis actions and resolutions in one another’s drafts, I empower my students to write characters in their own drafts who operate with agency and wholeness. Gone are stock protagonists who are fully good or evil. Gone are simplistic endings with a moral to the story. Gone are moments of Deus ex Machina, when God-as-machine (fate) takes over with luck. Instead, my students aim to incorporate the fraught decision-making that leads to complex emotional responses, which is to say that they aim to write flesh and blood characters, alive with vigor and verisimilitude.
Protagonist: Name the main character, the individual whose journey it is, the person going through the most internal change.
Antagonist: Name the persons and forces that get in the way of the protagonist’s journey
Point-of-View: Name the point of view through which the narrator tells the story.
Crisis Acton/Turning Point: Describe the story’s crisis action, or the action in the story that embodies the protagonist’s major decision or change. (If you can’t find a clear crisis action, make your best guess and explain your difficulty here.)
Resolution: Describe the feeling of the protagonist as a result of their decision.
Themes: Name a few abstractions that this story embodies.
Meaning: Try to articulate what the story seems to say about what it means to be human. Paradoxes are GREAT to note here. Always start with the word “sometimes.” We are not looking for a moral imperative here.
Praise: What is the author doing well in this story?
Suggestions: Name at least two elements the author can improve upon, using the craft ideas and terminology expressed in class and in your textbook.
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Rebecca Lauren lives in Philadelphia, teaches at Eastern University, and serves as managing editor of Saturnalia Books. Her writing has been published in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, and Ruminate, among others. Her poetry collection, The Schwenkfelders, won the Keystone Chapbook Prize. She is also the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award.