Hello everyone
Making a cup of tea is simple enough. You pour boiling water over leaves (if you’re using bags rather than leaves, you and I are going to have to have a serious conversation), add milk if you like, and add sugar if you’re that way inclined.
Once you’ve made a cup of tea, you can’t unmake it. You can’t strain the tea back into the leaves to give fresh water. The end product exists now, in this new form, and there’s no path back to where it was before. It’s a simple cup of tea, but the process is not reversible.
once the tea is made, you can’t separate it back into leaves and water
So why am I thinking about irreversible actions? In short, because these are the engines of story.
Forward Motion
A story starts when a character wants something.
That want is not especially interesting on its own. What makes the story move—what makes a reader care—is what happens when the character acts on that want. Once the character takes a first step—once they make their first irreversible action—then they can never return and they have to continue moving forward.
there is no return
But it’s not one action. A story is made up with a whole series of these actions and revelations, big and small. And every irreversible decision or revelation drives the story forward.
What is Irreversible?
It’s too simple to think of “dramatic” (big or showy) as being important within a story. It might be fun, but it’s not necessarily important.
The significance of irreversible comes because of the permanence of the change. So, for instance, if a wife is told by her husband that he is having an affair, her (probably quite justified) reaction is irrelevant.
She may shout or scream. She may sit quietly. She may cry. She may get violent. And there will likely be subsequent consequences. However, the reaction and the consequences are irrelevant.
What matters is that, on learning that her husband has had an affair, her life has been irrevocably changed. Her life has changed because the trust between her and her husband has been shattered. The couple might find some accommodation within their relationship, but what they had before has gone.
the old life is gone
Or think about a fight. One man punching another isn’t irreversible in itself. People fight and then, remarkably often, patch things up. What can be irreversible is whatever caused the fight: a betrayal witnessed, a lie exposed, a line crossed that can’t be uncrossed regardless of how the physical confrontation resolves. The fistfight is noise. The cause is the story.
A Time to Reveal
A revelations can have the same effect as an action—something irrevocably changes.
Where revelations differ from actions is in their timing. If two characters are involved in an action—say, two characters have a fight—then they both know about the fight, simultaneously.
By their nature, revelations are asynchronous and hinge on a character finding information that was previously (1) hidden from them, but (2) known to another. So, a character may find out that their father was not who they thought he was or that a friend betrayed them many years ago.
With the hiding of the original action, the consequences of the revelation and the irreversible changes that flow are more devastating.
the delay makes the consequences more devastating
But more, the asynchrony is something that can heighten the drama. If the reader knows the secret, but knows that a character is ignorant of the secret, then this lack of revelation creates tension. And then, there is the reason for the matter to be kept secret. Often there will be shame or an attempt to protect another character. The combination of tension and the motivation for secrecy greatly increases the stakes in a story.
And What About Us?
I’ll admit, my thoughts about irrevocable choices didn’t stay neatly contained. As these things do, it started leaking into notions about how we live our lives and the decisions we actually make that can’t be taken back.
Not necessarily the decisions that felt enormous at the time—plenty of those turn out to be reversible however dramatic they seemed in the moment. It’s usually the quieter ones. A conversation that changes how we see someone. A choice made on an entirely ordinary afternoon that, looking back, turned out to be the hinge everything else swung on.
I don’t have a tidy answer for what to do with these thoughts, other than to notice them. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe noticing which of our choices are actually the tea—made, and not capable of being unmade—is its own small use.
Until August
I’ll leave you to think about your own choices and decisions until August.
Until then.
All the best
Simon