In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Tower card to guide their discussion. They discuss how to write the dark night of the soul, whether you’re writing high stakes or low stakes fiction.
Question of the week: How do you approach the dark night of the soul? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Hand of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. And welcome to the Write Away podcast episode 104. We are recording July 23rd, 2022. And I’m Crys Cain with my co-host…
Listeners may have realized that we didn’t do our normal book club a couple weeks ago. And this was a chaos of confluations, the number one being that the book we had picked was far more intense and less applicable to indie publishing than we realized.
It’s a book. We still are really interested in going over, but one that we wanna have time and the right people to talk about. Not saying anyone in our group is not the right people, but we wanna have additional people because this book was very intense on some diversity subjects that we feel like we need few other educated voices on if we are gonna talk about that book.
JP: Definitely. It is a good read though. FYI.
Crys: Yeah. And then I meant to record an intro to tell you that two weeks ago, but I was on vacation, literally starting my vacation with my kiddo. And so it didn’t happen, but here we are. We are still moving ahead with our next book club read, Newsletter Ninja 2 by Tammy Labreque.
if you haven’t read Newsletter Ninja 1, don’t worry. These are just all different aspects of running a newsletter. And Tammy’s so freaking smart. This is her special interest. really knows her stuff. And both books are super helpful, but you can pick them up at any time.
JP: She also addresses some things that you may or may not need to know from book one in book two. So it’s not you, it’s not like you have to.
Crys: This week, our question is inspired by The Tower. can you give us the description of The Tower?
JP: I suppose, but do we wanna talk about has been two weeks? No, not feeling that?
Crys: Let’s do that.
JP: All right. The tower–
Crys: No, let’s do it. Let’s do our weeks. I. I’m not awake. It’s a Saturday. It’s almost six o’clock where I’m at. I think we’re at the same, are we in the same, no, I’m an hour behind you right now.
JP: It’s almost seven.
Crys: Yeah. have an hour of awakeness on me or at least potential awakeness. I don’t know if that’s actual ness. Yeah.
JP: Yeah.
Crys: And how was your writing week?
JP: Oh. So we haven’t talked for a while, so I’ll start the–
Crys: It’s been like, how was your writing three weeks?
JP: The last three weeks, the first two were pretty good. I had travel for work and I had a lot of starting energy. I got four chapters into the Publish In Six thing. I got book two done and sent to beta readers. We launched! A book! But yeah, this week I got COVID.
Crys: Yay.
JP: And you know what that means? I did nothing. Brain fog is real and like every time I would be like, “I need to write.” It would all of a sudden be three hours later. I don’t know what happened. It’s weird. It’s very weird. That’s where I’m at. How’s your weeks?
Crys: For vacation… I didn’t write. I didn’t produce anything. What I did do was read Zoe York’s Romance Your Goals and Romance Your Brand. As I’ve been in this swirling thought miasma what do things look like now that my co-writers gone?
So it helps me put together some thoughts, some ideas it didn’t change my plan for how I moved forward with the co-writing stuff. But it did change some of my plans of what kind of stuff I’m going to write fantasy wise. And it may actually help me write faster.
I think I mentioned earlier, on one of the Patreon episodes one of the things I think holding me back is this determination to publish under my real name, that be keeping me from writing.
I haven’t committed to writing under a pen name, but I’ve given myself the freedom to writing under a pen name if I so desire. I do think that is going to help. And the fantasy stuff that I was working on before were very much I just really wanted to write things I loved and that’s not stopping, but I didn’t necessarily start with marketing for them.
So one of the things I’m doing now instead of working on those is I’m starting from scratch a bit so that I can work on what genre I’m writing for, what marketing I’m doing, so that I can have an easier time getting up and going and market.
Because I gotta keep a roof over my head. If I didn’t have to keep a my head, it wouldn’t matter as much, but this is how I pay the bales. So bills.
was really good on my writing days until yesterday because I didn’t eat breakfast. And so I was writing first thing when I got back from dropping the kid off at school and working on the romance and then doing thinky thoughts on the fantasy in the afternoon.
So that went really well. Now I know I need to eat breakfast every morning so that I can write. So that’s in the plans and that’s what my weeks have been like.
JP: Nice. I like it’s, you’re starting to get a plan starting to move forward.
Crys: Yeah, I think I’ll be able to write faster. I do really well writing to market. I was a grade a student. Like you give me expectations, I’ll meet them. I’m the same way with writing. You give me expectations, I’ll meet them. You don’t give me expectations, I am lost in a sea of decisions.
JP: Yeah, for sure.
Crys: this worrying niggling in the back of my brain that maybe I have to be a write to market writer to get things done. That frustrates me because I also hate rules. But if that’s how I get stuff done, that’s how I get stuff done.
JP: Can you trick yourself by creating rules for the things you want to write?
Crys: I don’t know. I don’t… part of me is like, no, because I know that I’ll have made up those rules, I also make up other rules for myself that I do trick myself into like the whole pen name thing. I don’t know. We’ll see.
JP: Yeah, I don’t know. Cause like with the cozy fantasy thing, I’m in the same boat where I wanna write something to marketish. My expectations or my rules are based off of the TV shows I watched as a certain age group, which has nothing to do with like genre or whatnot.
But I’m putting the expectations on this is going to be written like this. And I don’t know, that keeps me moving forward cause I keep entertaining myself.
Crys: Yeah. Yeah. I know… shall see. Yeah, I’m definitely still still starting cozy fantasy, but I may be bringing more romance into it than I originally planned just to make it easier to market.
JP: Exciting.
Crys: Indeed.
With Patreon updates, we wanted to thank Mary Van Everbroeck for upping her pledge. Thank you so much, Mary!
JP: Thank you. Woo.
Crys: All right. Now we can talk about The Tower.
JP: Oh, great. The Tower is the worst card in the Upright Tower, sudden change upheaval, chaos, revelation, and awakening reversed, personal transformation, fear of change, averting disaster.
So the general depiction of The Tower is a tall tower approached on top of a Rocky mountain lightning striking it and setting the building on fire. Two people leaping from the windows, headfirst, arms outstretched. It is just pure chaos and destruction.
And it represents like ambitions, goals made on false premises. Premeesees? It represents ambitions and goals made on false premises. And yeah, it’s just, it’s chaos incarnate.
Crys: As was that last 30 seconds.
JP: Towards which no one will hear.
Crys: That’s going in.
JP: Great. I can’t wait. Yes. So this card in story structure represents like dark night of the soul, for sure.
Crys: Our question is how to make the worst case scenario for your main character.
Now a lot of times writers take this to mean how do you make everything the worst, like physically, can work really well for action type books. Like The Tower, we’re gonna throw them on a falling burning tower with lightning striking and make them jump.
But for me, the stories that resonate for me, it’s very much about what could happen worst emotionally character.
JP: Mm-hmm. A hundred percent.
Crys: And especially as I’ve been studying cozy fantasy where somewhat low stakes, the worst thing rarely something that people from the outside would look at and go oh, that’s terrible. Far more often they’ll be like, what are you so stressed out?
JP: Yeah. I’m like thinking about several ways of making like the worst case scenario, which to me comes at the dark night of soul, the worst moment in the story.
And there’s almost one cruel thing to do, which is to give your character exactly what they wanted at the start of the novel, which is no longer a piece that fits with who they are currently, because.
They think they have everything they want, but they no longer fit in that world that they believe in. And that’s like an emotional gut punch because what they envision, what they believe to be the penultimate thing that they wanted no longer is there. So what do they have left? And then they have to sit with that and reconstruct what their idea is of something better.
I enjoy that kind of thing because almost creates this loop or this full circle, or it answers the question of have they changed? So it’s this constant, give them what they wanted, but not at the time that they want it, the time that they need it.
Crys: And in a parallel contrast to that, Dan Harmon’s Story Circle has at the midpoint, they get what they wanted, the thing they thought they wanted, and then immediately face all the consequences of receiving it.
JP: Yeah, that one’s… I can see that too.
Crys: Or like later on at the dark night of the soul really hit the consequences.
JP: Yeah. Yeah. Where like they they still think that they want it. And then they have a long prolonged time the world is telling ’em that doesn’t fit anymore.
Crys: So in Diehard your worst moment is John McClain has finally reached his wife, but the bad guy, Hans Gruber ,has her and has a gun pointed to her head. there’s your dark night of the soul.
But in contrast, like like. this will require more explaining, but I’m obsessed with Victoria Goddard’s Hands of the Emperor which I sent, I think a fairly incoherent four minute message to you about but I read the–
JP: It was wonderful.
Crys: It felt incoherent. But the main character, Kip, he is second in power to the emperor. He is the equivalent of a Pacific Islander and none of his family really has ever come to visit him in the center of the empire. have no idea what he does. He’s just cousin Kip. He is the one who left. He is the one who doesn’t fit. And they think he’s just like this minor secretary. They have no idea who he is and what he is. And he’s constantly upset and disappointed that they don’t ask him about his work.
They don’t they don’t acknowledge his achievements. his dark night of the soul is where he has to, he gets a little drunk, and he has to tell his family exactly what his job means and what he’s accomplished in life. Like he has to just be vulnerable. That’s his dark night of the soul.
JP: And that sounds terrible.
Crys: Right?
JP: Yeah, no, but I can totally see that too. Cause like for character situations like that is the worst case scenario having to explain to a group of people you don’t want to.
Crys: Yeah, but like the thing is if he wants them all to come to this celebration that literally puts him as head of the entire government spoiler alert for anyone– he has to he has to tell them how important this ceremony is, or they won’t know that they should come.
JP: Ugh.
Crys: it’s so good. I love the heavy internal intensity of the cozy fantasy style without any of the trappings of physical intensity.
JP: Yep. Yep. I like that. Cause it’s like a emotional journey as opposed to physical harm.
Crys: Now, at this from the character’s wound, I think it’s fairly easy to find what the the emotional worst case scenario would be.
I haven’t sat down and actually figured out what Kip’s, how to phrase Kip’s wound. But one of them is that his family will never see him as he truly is, he’ll always be the kid he was when he left.
And he’s like a 55 year old man when this dark night of the soul happens. So you’re like, okay, his family will never see him. So then you know that your dark night of the soul has to be, he has to do something to make his family see him.
JP: Right.
Crys: And for him, that’s. He, the whole novel, anytime someone asks him about his work, he deflects and asks them about their work.
Like it’s all his own fault in a lot of ways. It’s not all his own fault, family dynamics. It’s fascinating. But he has to the thing that he’s been avoiding the entire book.
With coming at it from a story hypothesis, point of view, how would you create your dark night of the soul?
JP: Using the story hypothesis, creating it off of the three needs. And I usually pick like an anchor need. So I’m gonna look at my whiteboard again. Just so you know so with my current cozy it’s affection, identity and protection with we can’t protect the ones we love, unless we love and accept who we are.
So it’s really focused on identity. Now you can pull apart the wound there, love and accept who we are. So clearly there’s some internal wound there regarding self identity. Now my main character, their family isn’t super accepting. It’s why they’re easily able to just move across the country and they don’t really have roots to settle down to.
So their moment they have to face is are they ready to set these roots down or not? And hitting a moment where they have to make that decision where their fight or flight response is gonna kick in because they’re so used to fleeing and. Fleeing is just not an option. That’s the moment that I really want to highlight as the worst case scenario where they have to face this thing that they’re so used to doing and make another decision.
Crys: Excellent.
My question for our listeners is do you approach the darkness soul? Are you a pantser and you just wait for the moment to show itself? Are you a plotter? Do you have a specific way of figuring out what that’s gonna be ahead of time? We would love to know.
JP: Yes. Tell us the secrets.
Crys: Thank you for joining us this week. We’re about to go record our business episode for our Patreon subscribers, which is I’m gonna that all again. Thank you for joining us this weekend every week. We’re about to. Record our business episode for our patron listeners, which is what do you dread most about writing?
You can join us for those over at www.patreon.com/writeawaypodcast
JP: see you later.
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