Writing + Consequences

After workshopping "Love Beepers," in Aimee Bender's class, my short story that has become a chapter in my second novel, The Ninjas of My Greater Self, she wrote about the importance of consequences in fiction, how when a character makes a decision to do something, the writer needs to exploit how that decision affects her because this helps bring the character more closely to reality + makes the reader more invested in who she is. The point isn't to just focus on the character's interaction (that may or may not affect her decisions), or even on the series of actions that leads up to the decisions she makes (though often that's important too), but to give that character a certain liability where decisions have consequences, because it's those consequences, the fact that characters--like humans--must bear the repercussions of their decision, that they must live with the things they do, it's that character ontology for lack of a better word, that connects us to characters, makes us feel that they're somehow more real + also grounds the narrative.

You know, I think she might be on to something.