Emotional Pain, or The Necessity of Rock Bottom: Why You Must Destroy Your Character’s Outlook
One of the most enjoyable parts of reading fiction is relating to a story’s characters. Readers want to lose themselves in a character’s growth. That growth centers around two things: the protagonist’s emotional pain and the depth of their personal rock bottom.
The Dark Night of the Soul is that rock bottom. This turning point, and the Black Moment that often precedes it, drives readers into the last quarter of your story. Your character’s lowest emotional point is their biggest moment of growth. Readers want—need—to see that growth, as painful as it is.
Readers, in fact, itch to see what the protagonist chooses to do in the following scenes and chapters. They chomp at the proverbial bit to know how your character will eventually climb out of their personal rock bottom.
Even the most plot-centered stories are still built on a character’s internal experience of external events. Each action, reaction, and decision they make comes from an internal motivation that drives their need to succeed.
So, let’s get into how to use emotional pain in your protagonist’s external arc, the impact this must have on their internal arc, and how vital the crucible of change is for your overall queer romance story.
Emotional Pain and the Character’s External Arc
As I said above, the Black Moment relates directly to a character’s external arc. Your protagonist has thrown everything they have, literally and figuratively, against the story’s antagonistic force and lost. That loss brings them to their knees. They don’t just retreat and lick their wounds. They convince themselves that the prize is no longer worth the fight.
Indeed, David G. Brown says, “Readers are compelled by characters who walk this knife-edge of success and failure, and so the closer you can bring the protagonist to devastation, the more you can pull on your readers’ heartstrings.”
In this case, devastation starts off from external events, a Black Moment that obliterates every part of your protagonist’s life. This moment is one small step above the rock bottom of their Dark Night. Back your character into the sharpest corner you can. Surround them with every small mistake, every planet-sized regret, that led them there.
In essence, don’t just bring your protagonist to their knees. Fill their rock bottom with quicksand, then provide a rope just a foot too short to reach. Story beats need to build on each other, especially in the middle half of your story. The complications and obstacles, the conflicts and betrayals, must chip off larger and larger pieces of your character’s armor.
Here’s a couple ways to take the pickaxe to your character’s steel protection.
Career Pressure
Say your character’s core identity is built around their job. They’ve worked years, perhaps decades, to build and maintain their relationships at work. Hours in the office, weeks on the road, months spent in the company of coworkers, clients, and potential customers. They spend the majority of the book putting their career first, to the complete detriment of the character(s) they profess to love.
The reasons your protagonist fears losing this piece of themselves could be legion. Play into those fears. Dig three levels deep, then dig some more to yank out the roots their jobs have wrapped around them. Who are they, then, without this piece of themselves?
Family Pressure
Cultural norms across the world bring their own types of expectations between a parent/guardian and child. Owing to this, your character may suffer critical emotional pain when stripped of the family they’ve tried so hard to impress. Without those expectations, they feel untethered to life. They’ve lost their inner compass. Now, they have nowhere to go but down.
Family stories are rife with conflict. Past hurts. Emotional baggage. [. . .] Like the roots of a tree, family bonds run deep and are so intertwined, they’re difficult to escape.
Characters forced to untangle themselves from the direct community of family react in visceral ways. The Black Moment of the rift drops your protagonist into a rock bottom they feel they’ll never escape.
Emotional Pain and the Character’s Internal Arc
Internal conflict serves as the fulcrum of character-centered stories. Characters experience the most pain in these moments. In the words of Dante, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
A character left alone with their thoughts (and the reader) after an emotionally destructive external event should be the most devastating portion of your story. They grapple with everything they’ve lost. They struggle to remember why they even tried for the external goal in the first place. Rather than determine what went wrong, they’re forced to answer why it all went wrong.
The emotional pain your protagonists experience should be unique to them. In a queer romance, each person involved in the relationship should have their own version of the Dark Night of the Soul. Each character reckons with their biggest internal flaws, the lie they’ve believed about themselves the entire story. It’s this lie that has crippled their ability to maintain this relationship against the antagonistic force—especially when that antagonistic force is them.
This rock-bottom moment is vital to your story. It’s relatable, first and foremost. We’ve all been crushed by something beyond our control, unable or unwilling to see beyond the darkness of that moment.
The Dark Night is where readers finally see the true essence of your protagonist. The character is stripped of any sense that they’re in control. That alone is frightening enough.
More so, however, you must force them to stare into themselves. They have to confront the ugliest truths about themselves, warts and all.
Crucible of Change
For the purposes of this blog, Merriam-Webster defines crucible as “a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.”
It’s in this crucible that every internal and external conflict your protagonist has faced comes to a head. More often than not, this looks like a twisted mirror image of the inciting incident, where there is no going back. Amanda MacGregor calls it the “rock bottom of the rock bottom.”
Suffering the most emotional pain of the book, characters are finally forced to own their mistakes. They see that the pain of staying where they are—staying who they are—is greater than the struggle they must undertake to get to the other side. The Dark Night is about letting that process happen in the first place.
Another key point is, as MacGregor continues, that “we as the reader don’t know if or how [the character] can rally after such a devastating blow or loss.”
Change comes through self-acceptance, yes. More so, it comes through self-forgiveness. Your character acknowledges the damage their inner lie has caused others, sure, but that’s only the beginning of the process. To climb from rock bottom, they must also acknowledge the damage that lie has caused them. They can stay the same and live in misery, or they can become who they were always intended to be, individually and in their relationship.
To Sum It All Up
The Dark Night of the Soul is the hardest phase of your queer romance. The protagonist must face off against themselves. Only the antagonistic force in your queer romance serves as the impetus toward that kind of internal confrontation. Otherwise, they continue to do the same things, live the same lie, and wonder why they keep bellyflopping into rock bottom.
Dr. Denise Renye poignantly states:
The dark night of the soul is an existential crisis, a time of sifting through what matters to you and what does not. It’s a time of reconnection and illumination to learn what works for you and what doesn’t.
Sufi professor, poet, and philosopher Hazrat Inayat Khan also says, “There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believe in and thought that you were.” (Emphasis added.)
Characters have no choice, then, but to question just how much of themselves they’re willing to give up in order to be who they were always meant to be. Your character can’t experience joy without sorrow, no pleasure without pain, and no happy ending without a harrowing struggle to overcome their inner demons.
Finally, don’t forget that readers must realistically doubt which decision your protagonist will make. The emotional pain your character feels should vibrate off the page like heat off asphalt. Readers want to experience the same inner rebirth your character does, even as they climb from rock bottom with them.
Reflecting On Your Story One Word At A Time!
