How can I make "acts of patience" exciting?
This answer to the question Averting Real Women Don’t Wear Dresses introduces a distinction between acts of patience and acts of daring.
[...] when it comes to telling a story [...] acts of daring are easy to show, and acts of patience are not [...]
[...] acts of daring [...] make a better story than acts of patience [...]
It is a common technique [...] to represent qualities and emotions through physical actions. [...]
But it is hard to translate patience into action. [...]
So, I now want to ask:
Even though it is difficult to make "acts of patience" the basis of a story, what if that's what we want to do? Indeed, how might we make "acts of patience" exciting?
I want to stress some limits to the scope of the current question:
The previous question I'm referring to discussed differences between women and men. These are out of scope here. I don't care (here) whether we think daring/patience are correlated to masculinity/femininity or not; I'm only asking about how to deal with "acts of patience".
This question focuses on "mainstream, commercial" fiction. In this context, I doubt Dostoevsky will offer the most useful examples (rather, I'm thinking of characters such as Malcolm Polstead and Sansa Stark as apt examples). That's also why I've included "exciting" in "how to make acts of patience exciting": I'm interested in e.g. fantasy adventures centred on "acts of patience", not in action-free philosophical allegories about the meaning of life (to which "acts of patience" may, admittedly, come much more naturally), although of course we might learn from the latter so as to achieve the former.
The "basic" or, perhaps, even "cheating" answer seems to be: just show "acts of daring" instead, and use them to represent, symbolise or otherwise stand in for the "acts of patience". Very well, point taken. But this question is about what else we can do.
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@Amadeus describes an "act of patience" as "not doing". I would argue that an "act of patience" can also be about keeping on doing, day after day, something that is very hard to do - it is about perseverance.
As an example, take The Wild Swans, or any work derived from that fairy tale. The main character must knit shirts of stinging nettle for her bewitched brothers to save them from a spell, and she must maintain silence the whole time. Tension is derived both from the pain she experiences working the stinging nettle, and from it becoming increasingly harder for her to keep her silence - much that is dear to her is threatened, even unto her life itself, and she must balance that against the success of her quest. There's a strong possibility of failure - the necessary element @Amadeus speaks about.
In The Lord of the Rings, Sam is characterised by following and supporting, not by "daring". He observes while Frodo acts. Yet as the story progresses, more and more we're in his head rather than in Frodo's, raising arguments regarding which one of them is the main character. The role of the loyal friend is an "act of patience" - the failure we care about is not his own, but the failure of the character he supports. This is similar not to the fan at home supporting his team, but rather to the coach.
(Note that Frodo too is characterised more by perseverance than by daring. Day after day he makes the same choice - to go on. But for him accepting the quest at least was an act of daring. He is similar to the Wild Swans example. For Sam there isn't even that. Contrast them with Merry and Pippin who leap into battle.)
The Pianist is a film in which the main character "acts" very little - instead he endures - an "act of patience". Here tension is derived from what he must endure, and the question of whether he will survive. I would also put All Quiet on the Western Front in the same category. Such tales aren't really about the individual, but about the group this individual represents - it is acting rather than being acted upon that makes an individual stand out. But the story doesn't become less interesting for that. There is sufficient action and tension forced by the environment.
In all those varied cases, the character will continue doing as they were doing. Hence "patience". Tension, hardship, possibility of failure, must therefore be derived from the resistance increasing. If the character started out walking on solid ground, he'll find himself plodding through mud, snow, quicksand, a brick wall.
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There's an amazing setpiece scene in the game Uncharted 4 where Nathan Drake is running from an armored vehicle, dodging bullets, leaping from one truckbed to the next, picking off his pursuers, and finally escaping on a motorcycle. It's a masterpiece of movement and action, and had my heart pounding. But then he gets back to his hideout, cheering the fact that he survived, and comes face to face with his wife Elena who thought he was safe on a business trip. Her expression is hurt and fear and betrayal. And my heart stopped.
It was an unforgettable experience for me as a storyteller. Video games, even more than movies, can subsist on pure spectacle, and that chase scene was the best I've seen. But it couldn't compare to the tension of the quiet dialogue that followed.
It was not as simple as Elena being an iron shackle that ruined all his fun. Not even close. The difference here was that we cared about both of them, and we wanted Elena to be happy just as much as Drake. But we knew that they had competing desires: he couldn't let go of his daring life, while Elena knew it couldn't go on forever.
In a sense, Drake's acts of daring depended on Elena's act of endurance. In that moment, her decision - whether to abide his swashbuckling life - threatened not only the fun we'd been having playing as Drake, but also their relationship which might not survive an upheaval.
Her choice of endurance wasn't just as exciting as the previous acts of daring; it was more.
I realize that this was a singular moment, and thus hardly qualifies as long, patient endurance. But the rest of the story was overshadowed by it, bringing continual tension. From then on, every time Drake held himself back, we saw that it was for her, and every time she showed understanding for his thrill-seeking obsession, it communicated growth in their relationship. It worked beautifully as a contrast to the visible spectacle of daring.
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The problem with an act of patience is that it is just waiting for something else to happen.
One way I can think of to make that "exciting" is by making the wait a progression, so incrementally it is happening and the patient character is seeing things happen, and hoping they mean what she thinks they mean, and her imagination is fired up by these incremental advances.
An example would be, say, watching the playoffs and hoping your team wins the championship; every game gets analyzed to death before it happens, as it happens, and after it happens. What does it mean? To the next game? To the championship? Did we take an injury? Was there a killer play? Who on the team is the hero, who's in the dog house seeking redemption? But the fan is never doing more than waiting, they are not contributing to the success or failure of the team. They are sitting on the couch and watching what happens.
Another example is watching a compelling TV series; same thing. It can be exciting by firing up the imagination, with each episode, of what might happen next. There can be unexpected twists and turns, but the excited person is not doing anything to influence the outcome.
I believe in a story the reader stays engaged for a simple reason: They keep turning pages to find out what happens next.
You should strive to create about five overlapping tensions in your story:
- What happens in the next few pages.
- How does this scene end?
- How does this chapter end?
- How does this Act end? (An Act is about 25% of the story).
- How does the book end?
The first two can go missing once in a while if the others are in place, but you need tension to carry the reader through the story. Now the easiest tension is indeed acts of daring. Why? Because they might not succeed.
Why does the TV series or sports match championship have tension? Because the outcome you are rooting for might not happen.
How do you give a story about an act of patience tension? Figure out how it might fail, or not work out. Don't make it a sure thing. It has twists and turns, things that look like failure but aren't. Unexpected consequences or occurrences that test her patience. Despair, and urges to give up. As well as positive signs and victories, so there are exciting moments when something wonderful comes to pass, that make our goal seem closer. They don't achieve the final goal but bring us hope that what we are waiting for will come to pass. So the reader is wonder, will she make it? That is the tension in the story.
If you can weave together these overlapping threads of tension, so the reader is always looking forward to see what happens, how she conquers the next challenge, then you have a story. It may not be a traditional plot, but it will be a story.
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I had to think about this one for quite a while, but finally I realized that there are two distinct kinds of patience, which I will call anticipatory patience and enduring patience.
Anticipatory patience is what gets you through the period of waiting for some exciting event. It is kids waiting for Christmas day. It is the nervous father pacing the hospital waiting room waiting for his child to be born. It is the soldier in a trench waiting for battle to begin. Anticipatory patience can be agonizing to live through, but it has an end and its tension comes from the anticipation of that end.
And, really, making anticipatory patience exciting should not be a big problem, because stories are built on the tension that comes from the anticipation of the climactic event. Stories keep the reader hooked on anticipation. Stories are an exercise in anticipatory patience.
Enduring patience is very different. Enduring patience deals with a fact of life that is not going to change, or is not going to change in any reasonable time frame that would place you into a state of anticipation. A prisoner serving a life sentence must exercise enduring patience. A parent with a severely disabled child must exercise enduring patience. Enduring patience is the denial of the very anticipation that is mainspring driving classical story structure. By its very nature, enduring patience is not exciting.
Does this mean that you can't build a novel around an act of enduring patience? No. For one thing, some literary novels don't have a classic story structure to begin with. They are more like extended vignettes. A skillful literary novelist could conceivably create an interesting novel around an act of enduring patience and have us all weeping by the end. But I don't think it would exactly be exciting.
The other possibility that occurs to me is that the act of enduring patience provides the background of the novel on which another kind of arc plays out. For instance, the person exercising enduring patience may follow an arc that leads them from bitterness and despair to love and acceptance, without changing the circumstances that demand their enduring patience. Could one consider such a story exciting? Perhaps you could. Once again it would seem to come down to building a sufficient level of anticipation for the climactic moment that leads to love and acceptance.
And, really, that would seem to apply to any story, regardless of subject matter. If you can build anticipation to a fever pitch, you will have an exciting climax, no matter how grim or how trivial the arc may be.
(It is perhaps worth noting in this regard that the excitement that comes from anticipation is different from the excitement that comes from sensory overload. Hollywood seems to have almost given up on the more difficult business of building anticipation in favor of simple sensory overload in every movie. But for the life of me I can't see how you could induce sensory overload in a tale of enduring patience.)
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