Writing 102: Grace
If I were to rank emotions according to how easy it is to get readers to feel them, things like anguish and desperate relief would be pretty far down the list. I can pull a sensible chuckle any time I like, but tears are hard to come by, and the right kind of tears are even harder.
Recently, while working on a bit of throwaway fanfiction, I found myself struggling with a particular feeling that I’ve felt a lot as a reader, but couldn’t quite manifest on the page. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call this experience grace.
By “grace,” I don’t mean anything having to do with agility or athleticism, nor anything like divinity or morality. I’m talking more about serendipity—but a very particular subset of serendipity, the kind that leaves me a broken, sobbing mess while my confused friends push pause on The Incredibles and wonder if they’re supposed to pat me on the back or something.
A few examples (movies are writing, too; leave me alone):
- In the film version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, during the final battle, there was a moment when—with Aslan gone, the Queen advancing, and the survivors of the first clash outnumbered three to one—a single phoenix immolated itself upon the battlefield, creating a wall of flame that bought Peter’s forces a precious moment of rest.
- In the book Hatchet, a tornado tears through everything Brian has desperately scraped together, destroying his tools, his home, his fire—and upending the plane that had crashed into the lake, bringing its tail above the surface.
- In the movie Billy Elliot, Billy has flubbed his audition, punched another kid in the face, and then utterly failed to explain himself in front of the board of judges. And then, as he’s turning to leave, defeated, one of the judges asks him the one question that might—might—give them the glimpse into his soul that they needed.
- In The Incredibles, Dash Parr has been separated from his parents, separated from his sister, and chased through about fifty miles of jungle by sinister thugs in death frisbee heli-drones. There are two of them hedging him in from either side; he has nowhere to go, and in front of him the trees abruptly end, revealing an enormous lake—
These moments absolutely crush me, and I’m starting to think I’ve figured out what they’re made of.
At first glance, what I’m calling grace might just sound like deus ex machina, which is (rightfully) maligned as one of the more mortal sins in writing. But grace and deus ex aren’t the same—they’re two sides of a coin, and it matters whether the coin comes up heads or tails.
I’m positing three components to grace:
- The character or characters must have tried their absolute hardest. No casual shrugs, no half-hearted efforts—we have to see someone who’s done absolutely every single thing they can think of, and “left it all out on the field.”
- Their best has to be demonstrably insufficient. Like, not just “bad luck” insufficient—they have to have come up short in a fundamental way. It has to be clear that they never could have won under the given circumstances—that the deck was insurmountably stacked against them.
- The moment of grace is believable and barely enough. It’s not smooth sailing after that—it’s merely a lucky break, and it’s as small as it can get away with being, giving the characters just enough of a boost for them to reach the edge of the pit with their fingertips.
That last bit is why the phoenix in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe counts as grace, whereas the reappearance of REDACTED is mere deus ex.
Why does this wreck me (and hopefully your readers as well)? I think it’s because of the way it makes answers-to-prayers a morally acceptable part of the universe. I get the sense that—I dunno—fate is actually constrained, but nevertheless on the side of the Good Guys? Like, if God himself shows up with a whole second army, you sort of—on an emotional level—start questioning why He made the characters go through all that painful, traumatic crap in the first place.
But in a situation saved by grace, it feels like God is constrained—like the lines of fate have meaning and can only be delicately shifted, and therefore this is the salvation they receive, because it is just enough, and therefore the most that could be spared. It’s Tobias being given the morphing power, despite remaining stuck as a hawk.
Grace rewards the righteous, the industrious, and the valorous, in a way that deus ex invalidates them—after a deus ex, your characters could shrug their way to victory. After receiving grace, if they weren’t true heroes, they could still fail. It leaves the characters at the center of the story, and means that their choices still matter. Dash still had to keep running—it’s just that he didn’t die right then.
This is why Neo’s resurrection in the Matrix is a beloved, celebrated moment in cinematic history, despite being about as literally ex machina as it gets. He gets a second chance to fight, not a victory-on-a-platter.
(I mean, at the end, it seems like it would still take one or two whole movies for them to figure out how to beat the machines and wrap up that whole storyline. Can’t wait for the sequel.)
And it’s important that Neo be exhausted, to the point that he has almost nothing left—that he risked his life to save Morpheus, and then took a savage beating down in the subway, and then ran as hard as he could toward salvation, only to meet with a bullet at the absolute last moment. It’s that struggle that makes us feel that his prayer deserves to be answered—that he wasn’t just some Mary Sue hoping to get out of doing the work. The agents were simply too strong, too fast, too capable—he was never going to win without help.
All right, so—you want Duncan to cry when he reads your story, and you’ve got these three boxes to check. How do you actually go about writing it?
Depends on the sort of story you’re telling. The movie Signs, for instance, was all about the moment of grace—that was the centerpiece of the entire plot. Merrill’s bat, Morgan’s asthma, Bo’s drinking glasses, Colleen’s last words—it was all about getting the characters to a place where they’d escape by the slimmest of margins, and the alien’s vulnerability to water was the last piece of the puzzle.
I think it’s more powerful, though, if the moment of grace doesn’t lead directly to the climax, but is instead a few steps back. It’s the turning point, with a long slog between it and victory. And finding that is almost easy:
Write the version where everyone dies.
Block every exit. Break every tool. Make your characters as strong as they can possibly be, and create challenges that are just a tiny bit stronger. Have their first plan fail, and their backup plan, and their made-up-on-the-spot Hail Mary, too.
And then you do the post-mortem. Look at the plot, and do the wistful what-iffing. What if they’d seen this. What if they’d had that. What if this one thing, instead of going wrong, had gone right. Look at all of your options, and pick the smallest intervention, the one that leaves your characters with so little light and so little hope that when it happens, no one would blame them for still giving up.
And then—when they don’t—when they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and stagger forward anyway—we’ll love them for it.
And heck yeah, we’re gonna cry.