Five Stages of False Agreements
False beliefs, or false agreements, drive story.
Above I mentioned two novels I recently read and how they swept me away. Yes, both had great plot twists and escalating conflict. But the characters and how they discovered and resolved their false agreements made the stories memorable.
What are false agreements and how does a writer work with them through the five stages of a story? Equally for fiction or memoir, characters travel certain pathways to self-awareness. Those pathways are built on two things: (1) what the character believes and has unconsciously agreed with in their life, and (2) the decisions that come from those beliefs.
Let’s look at how these beliefs and their resulting decisions travel through a story.
The limited view
Basically, if a character is going to grow, they have to change. What do they have to change? Whatever they are certain about, often. Stories usually start with character certainty about some area of life—built by their past and experience. These certainties shift by the end of the story and the character emerges with a different view, less limited.
That’s a simple way to look at the narrative arc, something you’ve heard about, I’m sure.
Most characters live rather unconsciously alongside these certainties. They are essentially false, beliefs that are limited or mistaken, beliefs about themselves and the way life works.
But this limited view has gotten them this far, so it’s hard to abandon. That’s why in the beginning of many stories, something dramatic happens to force change. I call this a triggering event, because it triggers a reaction, new direction, new decisions.
The trajectory of change is not linear, though. The character goes through three more major stages, and these correspond to certain points on a storyboard, which I have found incredibly helpful to know about. Below, I’ll take you through those stages, using the storyboard points.
But first we have to look at something called the “wounding event” (with thanks to Michelle Hoover for that name) which heavily influences the false belief that drives the character’s change.
Wounding events
As the story moves along, we learn about the character’s backstory, which ideally includes one or more traumas from earlier in the character’s life. These “wounding events” are like secrets that influence every aspect of the character’s beliefs and decisions now.
Another way to play with this is to fill in the blank for your character, using this sentence. Try it a bunch of times—see what you get. The first X is a past experience.
Because of X, I believe X.
I find it great fun to research a character’s life for the wounding event that created their false belief. I do a character bio, both with words and images, and gradually the possibilities of harm emerge. In Wild Dark Shore, the narrator suffered a tragic loss—a death she has never gotten over and which has left her determined in a certain way. In The Frozen River there is also a tragedy of loss in the narrator’s backstory, but her false belief has to do with her ability as a woman in a male-dominated culture. There’s no one prescription for what a wounding event will create. It’s the writer’s job to uncover it.
Planting the wounding event and false belief
These two authors do a super job at planting clues about the wounding event through the story. By “planting,” I don’t mean a big reveal right away. Both novels keep the secrets of what really happened until almost the end. Which keeps us reading, of course.
I cringe when I read a manuscript where everything about the character’s interior life is delivered at the beginning--that also delivers zero tension.
Better to break your reveal into smaller clues, planted through the ups and downs of your storyboard.
Below are the guidelines I teach writers who want to plant clues most effectively. I use a storyboard structure to map this, and here’s my instructional video if you want a refresher or a new look.
Planting false belief on the storyboard
Point 1 (triggering event): a dramatic incident that creates the initial story tension, shows the false belief, but doesn’t necessarily clue us into its cause. Things get worse after this.
In The Frozen River, a body is found in the ice of the river and the village midwife has to declare the cause of death. In Wild Dark Shore, a shipwrecked woman washes up on a remote island and the family that lives there rescues her. These triggering events (or you can also call them inciting incidents) force the story forward.
Each character gets to face their limited beliefs as a result of this event.
Point 2 (first turning point, about 100 pages in): I call this the “I can’t take it anymore” point. We get the first hint of the character’s awareness that the status quo they believe may not be what they want anymore. There’s sometimes a decision to change things—even if they don’t know how.
Things have gotten worse for the character since the triggering event. They have to reach beyond their false belief and get help, ask questions, take action, even if it goes against everything they have believed to this point. False belief is being challenged but the cause is not yet revealed.
Scenes at this stage, and leading up to it, need to hint at the character’s new doubt about their certainties. Maybe they aren’t completely sure, and this shows up in small acts of change, new alliances, asking for help from someone they newly trust, etc. I use the second leg of the W, from point 2 to point 3, to develop this doubt and new awareness.
Point 3 on W (second triggering event, about 150 pages in): After new ideas begin to come into the character, and perhaps someone new helps the character start to free themselves from the trapped place of a false belief, they gain new skills or strength or friendships or alliances. This all leads to point 3.
Ironically, point 3, is not a linear movement to more awareness. It’s actually a point of some denial, renegotiation back to where they came from. But at or around point 3, that midpoint of your story, something else happens. Another triggering event, in a way, that launches an even deeper change. A new problem that’s worse that the one they began with, or hits them in a more profound way, forcing them to really look at their agreements and their validity.
When I think of the two novels I just read, point 3 is quite clear in both—one reason I loved the structure of these books. The Frozen River offers a new suspect for the murder, a change that greatly affects the narrator and causes much new doubt in what she can trust. In Wild Dark Shore, a new and dangerous alliance begins, which might compromise all four of the narrators’ plans, and especially those of the woman who was shipwrecked.
Look at it this way: from a story structure view, point 3 expands or deepens point 1. If the writer does their job well, the reader will care even more about the character after point 3. I usually notice that point 3 comes when things are peaking into stability. Oops!
The bargaining aspect looks like this: ”If only I could X, then I’d be able to X.”
Point 4 on W (second turning point, about 250 pages in): Point 3 scrambles everything and causes the final major story stage: point 4. Often called the “All is lost” moment, the tone of point 4 is the ultimate betrayal and loss.
Maybe your narrator finds out the kind helper from point 2 is actually the enemy. Maybe the love interest is suspected of betrayal. Maybe the help she counted to make it through is suddenly lost in a catastrophe like a fire or death.
By point 3, we’ve begun to really understand the character’s false agreement and where it came from, because small bits of backstory have been delivered carefully. At point 4, we often get the entire backstory. The character is stripped bare, emotionally.
I find point 4 is also the ultimate face-off with the false belief: no methods from the past work now. The character must reinvent themselves and abandon the limited view of themselves or their life in favor of growth.
That is, if they have an upward trajectory. If the character is tragic, they will embrace the false belief completely and fall.
Point 5 on W (close to or at the end, about 300-350 pages in): In many books, especially contemporary fiction and memoir, there’s a point 5 where the ultimate crisis happens. Usually it’s within the last 25 pages of the story. It’s the final test for the character’s false belief and new state of awareness.
We often see a new person in our character now. They do or say or become something that proves their false belief is not driving anything anymore. New belief, not false, is operating now.
These are very helpful points to consider, so try the exercise below to test them out.
Your weekly writing exercise
To test this theory, read for it. Either browse a familiar book you love, fiction or memoir, or check out one of the two books I recommend above. See if you can:
Identify the narrator’s false belief within the first 25 pages.
See where that false belief starts to shift.
See where the wounding event that caused this false belief is revealed, even hinted at. Usually a loss or trauma in the narrator’s backstory.
Identify the gradual moments where the false belief is challenged, then finally when it dissolves (point 4) if you can.
Ask how the narrator emerges at the end of the story, in regards to their false belief. What’s different in how they view their life?
Many, many books that fit this W structure show the evolution of the false belief. It’s invisible to the reader, generally, but the writer with keen eyes can see--and learn from it. Have fun and share your findings or thoughts or questions!Photo by Kiki Falconer on Unsplash