Season 2, Episode 28: Making Readers Care
Mel and Abby continue their discussion of Don Maass’ workshop and talk strategies on getting your deadlines done on 3 days of no sleep (or doing anything on no sleep, like finding your way around the Vegas airport at 12:30 AM..).
Trying to get your page count done while on “vacation” (or professional development) can be rough, but it’s important to accept what you can do and appreciate your own effort, and not get down on yourself about word count or page count.
“I didn’t beat myself up for it…so what, you wrote eight pages. That’s eight more than I had before!”
Making readers care – Don Maass says that when the protagonists care themselves, we care about the protagonists. In Abby’s story, her protagonist is in the middle of her journey – she had a goal and failed, she feels like she can’t make a friend and she abandoned the friend she had, and she doesn’t know who she is anymore. This is her “mirror moment” (James Scott Bell, her turning point. Now, she’s going to do the impossible, but it has to feel impossible first.
Kemlo points out that even though Abby had heard about this particular moment in the hero’s journey before, sometimes you need a bunch of different tools in your toolbox before something clicks – this particular moment in Don Maass’ workshop happened to be the moment it clicked for her.
Abby and Kemlo work on deepening Bernadette and Logan’s friendship – Logan’s actions need to be just vague enough for Bernadette to have some inner conflict, to wonder if he really is her friend. Abby wonders if this could be a take-charge moment for Bernadette, an opportunity for her to claim some agency over what happens to her. This is what Don Maass calls “static energy vs kinetic energy”. Static energy is just sitting back and letting things happen to you, and kinetic energy is standing up and taking charge of your fate. Even a small defiance along the way is better than no defiance at all.
Kemlo says that now Abby needs to bring it full circle. How do these events affect Bernadette? How do they make her change her plans, or not?
“Maybe I need to go back to the beginning of this chapter…where she realizes she’s a bad friend and she wants to change, but maybe now she starts with Logan. ‘This is the one kid that’s been nice to me, maybe that’s where I need to start.”
