How do you bring a character to the edge—the breaking or turning point—a moment that is life changing?
Let’s say our character has reached a moment that has been coming for a long time. Maybe today’s the day that Joe, who’s the last descendant of the family to live in the old house, the one built by great grandfather—has to move out and has no idea where he will sleep tonight. Because Joe hasn’t been able to get work since the plant closed, he’s had to mooch meals and wash his clothes where he could. The electricity was turned off a month ago. The old place has its own well, but he can’t get water because the pump runs on electricity. When the IGA’s got food they can’t even give to the shelter they put it in a gray bin that’s kept as clean as possible. The manager knows poor people will get it before the garbage truck arrives in the morning. Joe just takes what he needs.
He’s been trying to sell the place and has the price down to where eighty-nine acres with a house, barn, and storage shed is less than what you could get for a ten-year old Ford F-150. Now that the taxes owed are more than his asking price the new owner will be Killdeer County on the first of the month. He tried taking in renters but people aren’t looking for places to live, just ways to get out.
The end point isn’t the realization that he’s got one week to clear out of the house. It’s not even the actual day of moving. It’s when he’s gone through the house a dozen times studying the contents of each room for anything that he’d regret leaving that he could still cram in the trunk, or wedge under the front seat. The upright rosewood piano was out of the question, but maybe he should take his great grandmother’s needlepoint that she did to cover the upper and lower panels of that old instrument. Cut them out with a kitchen knife and lay them down on the pile of clothes on the front seat. Once he got to his new place he could…
The ultimate edge comes when he walks over the threshold for the last time, and struggles with whether it’s right or wrong to leave the front door open. His anger over the mismanagement that killed the plant and put everybody out of work, and the way the big poultry co-op devalued all of the small farms, and how no one would extend you credit until you got back on your feet made him want to say fuck it, and just let the wind and rain blow through the place. But at that moment when he remembers afternoons in the tire swing, and hears his mother singing to his baby sister in the next room when she was so sick—and how his grandfather swore at her as though Dad’s leaving was her fault—when these things come to mind, these memories he didn’t even know he had or want to have, rush up his spine and into his brain he closes the door behind him and steps down from the porch into whatever his life was going to become.
Somehow in those end points, those life changing moments, it’s necessary to make the reader know the character’s memories—his regrets, excitement and fears. You don’t have to tie everything into a neat package. It’s all right if he’s confused because that’s the way these end and beginning points hit us. As I am writing a hungry person is looking into a trash barrel for something to eat for the first time in his life. This man or woman has enjoyed three meals a day for decades. He’s nibbled at parties and pumped change into vending machines to stave off the hunger pangs of a long afternoon. What’s happened in the past weeks to bring him to this point? Is he selective, picking carefully through items on top of the pile, maybe finding some French fries, thinking this is no different from sharing with friends at McDonald’s? Will he separate a piece of a discarded sandwich to be more sanitary? It’s his first time. Maybe it will be his only meal scavenged from a garbage can, or maybe not. All we know is in that moment hunger trumps the past and future. Let the reader feel the revulsion, the shame, the outrage. Once past this turning point, begin piecing together where our character goes from here.
The last day in the old house—the first time pawing through garbage—or shoving merchandise into a coat pocket or shopping bag from another store—these moments place your character at center stage in the spotlight. Authenticate them with memories and emotions; include tears, a rumbling stomach, or blood-curdling scream. When you do that your reader sees himself as a reflection of your character.