Of Spirals, Parking Garages, and Points of Entry and Identification…

The road that led your protagonist away at the opening of your novel or story brings her or him home again during the final stage, but at a new level of awareness.

And since time has moved forward, while the central character has been gone, we could entitle the journey, Back to the Future and Home Again.

The central character of the story has traveled in a spiral, moving both vertically and horizontally.

They have broadened their perspective. This encompasses the circular motion of the spiral.

The central characters of a novel, or story move in an upward line, like the levels of a parking garage like the levels of a parking garage going from ground entrance to the roof.

While the protagonist may not have reached the highest level of consciousness, in order to satisfy and entertain the reader, their journey must have taken her or him forward, landed them in a mental and heart-space higher than where she or he stood at the outset of the novel.

The central character must evidence some degree of accomplishment, which lays the foundation for internal growth.

Did she or he reach their goal?

Did they retrieve, find, or save that which they set out to ascertain?

If not, what did they find or gain instead?

And what did that bestow upon, or endow them with?

The answer to each one of these questions begs the second and as important question, “How did your physical gain, or loss reshape you?”

While it truly aids a story to have a physical object attached to the protagonist’s quest, questions of accomplishment focus not so much on the desired object, as much as what it represents, and the bridge of identification it builds connecting the reader to the experience of the central character.

While all readers may not understand nirvana, epiphany or the achievement of bliss, most can understand the loss of a mother, father, or both and consequentially the need to reconnect with those figures if separated from them.

Should they have died, we all can relate to the grief any character undergoing such would experience.

Thus the loss of a tangible and important object or person in an individual’s life establishes the base of yearning she or he undergoes and experiences when either seek to replace, find or integrate the grief of that loss.

Death is death. But to attach a figure to that death, that of a mother, father, brother, sister, best friend, physician, psychotherapist, etc. makes the experience more tangible.

Physicality grounds, and roots the emotions that accompany the attached experience.  Physicality grounds, and roots a character’s experience in the emotions of the reader. Physicals connect experience with emotions and allow the reader to identify with the character.

The loss of one’s wallet conjures many images and a vicissitude of emotions in the reader that go along with the experience.

The joining of a physical object to the incidents in the protagonist’s life provides a point of entry for the reader into the world of the central character.

Once inside, the reader travels with the protagonist through all the mountains and valleys of the journey, the peak experiences of crisis and climax and also those quiet moments of solitude and sadness that rise during death, rebirth and renewal.

Likewise, having journeyed with the major character along this path, the reader too is set to accompany her or him during this last leg of the journey, as they set out for home.