January 2012

DILEMMA: The Source of Our Story

“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but to get better.”
– Sydney J. Harris

At the heart of every story lies the protagonist’s dilemma. It’s not a question of whether or not our protagonist has a dilemma, but rather how effectively we’ve explored it. By inquiring into our protagonist’s dilemma, we’re led to the most dynamic and specific version of our story. In fact, the dilemma is the source of our story, and it’s from this place that all drama arises. The dilemma helps to clarify what we’ve been attempting to express. It helps distill our prose to its clearest meaning. It sheds light on what does not belong,  those random digressions that are not germane to the central conflict and that may obfuscate our story’s intended meaning. It offers clues to what still needs to be rewritten and indicates the most effective order of events to convey what we’re attempting to express.

Here’s the rub: The dilemma can’t be figured out, at least not in our heads. We must become invested in our characters in order to connect to it. There can be a tendency to hold so tightly to our idea of the plot that we choke the aliveness of our characters, and are left with flat, two-dimensional versions of what they could have been. By inquiring into the dilemma, we’re free to explore the most dynamic and surprising way to express our story.

WHAT IS A DILEMMA?

A dilemma is a problem that can’t be solved without creating another problem. Many writing books talk about the dramatic problem, that thing that the protagonist attempts to solve or overcome through the story. After many years of teaching writing, I’ve discovered that this is where writers sometimes get stuck. When we approach our story as if our protagonist is struggling with a problem, we internalize the idea that it’s our job to figure out a solution, and we get into our heads. This approach doesn’t work, because underlying our protagonist’s ‘apparent’ problem is a dilemma, of which there is no solution! The dilemma is the protagonist’s internal struggle between his goal and the meaning he ascribes to this goal. It is this dilemma that carries the conflict and leads the protagonist inexorably to the climax of the story.

If our story simply chronicled our protagonist’s journey towards the solution to his problem, the reader would be disappointed. We’re less interested in him getting what he wants than in him getting what he needs. We’re interested in the underlying reason for the journey, ie: the theme. The plot is merely the vehicle that carries this underlying meaning.

The problems our protagonist encounters address our story’s plot, but when we start to look at these problems as a whole, we begin to see patterns, and when we distill these patterns to their nature, we begin to identify the dilemma. The dilemma is the source of our story through which the theme is explored.

WHERE DID MY STORY COME FROM?

Perhaps our story began as a premise, a character, or a single idea, but underlying these impulses was a subconscious quest for resolution. The creative impulse seeks to make order from chaos, to contextualize a series of events with the intention of making new meaning from them. It’s unlikely that a writer is immediately conscious of the dilemma. Rather, as storytellers, we’re naturally drawn to unresolved situations: Will Jimmy Stewart ever leave Bedford Falls? Will Dorothy ever find her way home? Will Harry Potter ever triumph over Lord Voldemort? These questions provide a vehicle through which we can explore a basic human dilemma. If Jimmy Stewart finally left Bedford Falls at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, we would be disappointed. If Dorothy escaped to somewhere over the rainbow, we would miss the point, and if Harry Potter simply destroyed Lord Voldemort without understanding something about himself, there would be no resolution to the theme.

Our story came to us for a reason. On some level, we are seeking resolution. Exploring the dilemma transcends genre, tone and any notion of traditional narrative. The dilemma is a fundamental experience from which no human being is exempt.

Until next month,

Al