Hello friends.
Welcome to the end of summer and the ennui that sets in every September. Wait, that’s just me? You mean I’m the only one who experiences seasonal malfunction at the onset of fall?
As a kid, I missed more first days of school than I attended. I used to call it the autumn sickness. Every September: fatigue, fever, flu. I had to leave college my junior year when, on the first day of registration, I was blindsided by mono. The dreaded “kissing disease.” Remember when we called it that? I’ve never gotten so sick so fast. I couldn’t walk without blacking out. I had to withdraw from school and return home for the semester.
If I had to point to specific events that forever changed the trajectory of my life, contracting mono would be right up there. The resulting pause in my matriculation tossed me back to the house of my parents’ troubled marriage, where I endured my father’s scrutiny regarding post-college employment: “So, what sort of job can you get with a BA in cultural anthropology?”
Mononucleosis, it turned out, served as a major catalyst to ensuing disruption. A number of dominoes fell, paramount among them, being talked into a BS in dietetics (my physician father was hopeful that in a hospital setting I would catch the eye of an orthopedic surgeon and “be set for life.” Wish I were kidding).
Changing my major halfway through undergrad, with the bonus of a semester’s deferment, plus my parents’ subsequent costly divorce, meant that, a. I had to take out way more loans than I’d planned to; b. had to get a part-time job at a watering hole where I ultimately met my first husband, and; c. had the pleasure of prolonging my studies to catch up on credits for my new major, which—surprise—ultimately landed me a series of minimum wage restaurant jobs before my eventual pivot to the dark arts.
Oh, the circuitous stumble through life. Which, oddly, coughs up the tools that prepares one for a “career” as a novelist. And with that, let’s leap into the theme of today’s post: disruption, and its place in setting up the energy flow in a piece of fiction.
When you study the craft of writing, sooner or later you’ll come across ye olde Freytag’s Pyramid. A simplified schematic representing dramatic structure. Your intro, your inciting incident, your rising action, climax, resolution. A very mechanistic glance at pulling a reader through a story. But the nerds among us want a more granular understanding of brain science and its relationship to absorbing and responding to narrative. In line with this, here’s what I’ve got for you today.