Learning to trust

In ourselves, in our characters and in our readers

Dec 12, 2023

white and gray wooden quote board — Photo by Skye Studios on Unsplash

Hello friends,

My regular posting has become a bit erratic due to a lot of moving around since I left Canada and arrived back in the UK on 17th November. Since then I haven’t been still for very long and have spent time in four different places. But on Friday, we arrived at a house sit in Scotland that goes on until the 6th January. Then the day after we start another that goes on until late April. It feels good to know that we have time to rest and catch up with things.

Since the experience in Canada, where the woman who owned the house we looked after told us she didn't trust us, the concept of trust has been on my mind. I also read a post by

Satya Robyn

recently where she picked her word of the year and the word that instantly came to me to guide my 2024, was trust.

When we arrived here at this house sit, where we are looking after a gorgeous, elderly and very sleepy cat, Mishi, and a young, boisterous and fun dog, Juno, I knew they had to put their trust in us strangers to look after them. And we most definitely will.

Mishi sleeping in her chair which she leaves for about a hour a day!

In choosing trust as my word for 2024, I am putting my trust in the universe and myself, and that all will be well despite the catastrophising my brain has been inclined to do lately, which I know is being driven by the uncertain nature of my lifestyle. But I’ve also been thinking about it in relation to my writing craft and the trust inherent in that.

The trust I have to put in the reader to allow me to hold things back, to know that they will follow my characters and that I don’t have to lay everything out on the page for them. But that I can’t be too obscure either - it’s a fine line!

But then I started thinking about it more deeply in relation to the characters I write and the people they trust, or not. Specifically I have been thinking about it for the two narrators in the novel I am just starting to write, and for the character in a story I am drafting for the project

Ben Wakeman

is running: Same Walk, Different Shoes.

And the conclusion I have come to is that although the trust our characters put in other people is an important element, what’s equally important, or maybe even more so, is the trust they have in themselves. The journey they go on throughout the story, be it a novel or micro fiction and everything in-between, is driven by trust — in their own mind, abilities, judgement, beliefs, strength.

Typically at the start they trust in something that no longer serves them and by the end, learn to let that go and place their trust in something more hopeful, healing and reliable.

We can see this in action in novels of all genres. In The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, the one character that runs through all the connected stories is Holly Sykes. At the start of the novel she doesn't trust in herself and her psychic abilities but by the end, she has come to accept they are a part of her and one she can use for her own, and the people she love’s, good.

In Expectation by Anna Hope, the three women narrators learn to trust in their own instincts and accept themselves for who they are whether that fits into other people’s ideas of who they should be, or not.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods explores Shadow’s lack of trust in himself and letting people see who he really is. He has to learn to trust in his own mind and ability to make the right decisions instead of floating along and letting others make them for him.

So how do we know the ways in which our characters need to develop trust in themselves?

It’s going to be linked to their fatal flaw, which is a concept I first learned about many years ago reading Dara Mark’s brilliant craft book: Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc.

The FATAL FLAW is a struggle within a character to maintain a survival system long after it has outlived its usefulness.

In The Bone Clocks, a young Holly survived discovering her psychic abilities and that the nature of reality was not as it had always seemed, by pretending it wasn't true. She carried on like this until she was forced to face up to it. Same for Shadow in American Gods, he kept on letting others decide his fate until it became clear that if he carried on doing so, he was probably going to meet a very sticky end.

So how do we find out what our character’s fatal flaw is? Partly by getting to know them really well (see my post here for more info on that) and also by understanding how it relates to the story you’re writing.

In Dara Marks’s craft guide she has a whole chapter dedicated to this but the most important learning I took from it is:

To define the fatal flaw organically, so that it rises to meet the writer’s intentions, it must be drawn from the theme.

So, dig deep into what your story is really about at its heart in order to reveal the element of trust your narrator needs to find in themselves.

I have just done this exercise for my novel, which has a working title of Things Left Behind as one of the characters appeared first in this story. One of the main characters is Daisy and her fatal flaw is that, because she betrayed someone she loved once when she was young and scared, she believes she’s a bad person, not to be trusted, and has spent her whole life not letting anyone close as she can’t be relied on. The theme of the story is a nebulous thing at the moment as it’s at such an early stage, but it’s connected to trust (of course!) and the power of true friendship to overcome betrayal and provide lasting love.

What do you discover about your story and characters if you do this exercise? Do let me know!

As part of learning to live more mindfully, I’ve also looked deep inside myself to discover my fatal flaws. Unlike a character in the stories I write, mine are not so easily defined as my life isn’t a novel and its themes are ever changing. But as well as helping me to develop my craft, I found the Dara Marks book helped me personally too. And I realised that’s because all the stories I write are me trying to make sense of this world and human experience and to help me develop more trust in myself, so that I can keep letting go of the survival systems I’ve deployed in the past that are no longer serving me.

With love,

If you’d like to explore these ideas more fully in relation to your own craft, then I am running an online workshop in the new year: Creating Complex Characters. It would be great to see you there.

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