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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48297
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48297
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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.)

Original score: 18