Most stories have both external and internal stakes: the lonesome pirate seeks her treasure but on the way learns to love, a young detective hunts a killer and grows in confidence as the case unravels. While the emotional life of characters gives our favourite novels, movies, and sitcoms heart, they are often much harder to write than the external story.
Throughout Hanya Yanagihara’s heart-wrenching novel, Jude inches toward complete self-destruction dogged by the horrifying trauma of his childhood. A Little Life is chunky and at its centre is Jude, his struggle with his mental and physical health, and the loved ones that strive to protect him. Left in another writer’s hands, these ephemeral, internal challenges could leave readers lost. However, Yanagihara’s skill is in making Jude’s inner challenges so visceral to the reader we cannot look away from his suffering.
“He was tired, he was so tired. It was taking so much energy to hold the beasts off. He sometimes had an image of himself surrendering to them, and they would cover him with their claws and beaks and talons and peck and pinch and pluck away at him until he was nothing, and he would let them.
After he returned from Paris, he had a dream in which he was running across a cracked reddish plain of earth. Behind him was a dark cloud, and although he was fast, the cloud was faster. As it drew closer, he heard a buzzing, and realized it was a swarm of insects, terrible and oily and noisy, with pincerlike protuberances jutting out from beneath their eyes. He knew that if he stopped, he would die, and yet even in the dream he knew he couldn’t go on for much longer…”
- A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara
One of the ways she brings the internal stakes of A Little Life to the fore is through her use of zoomorphism. In this passage, Jude’s struggle to keep his mental health in check is expressed through the image of prey hunted by beasts. The beasts do not maintain the same form but shapeshift as they ceaselessly torture Jude. At times they are referred to as hyenas, here they are beasts with claws, talons, and beaks then a swarm of terrifying insects.
By morphing Jude’s internal battle into a physical one, the reader is able to grasp the horror, pain and total exhaustion Jude feels when the trauma of his childhood takes hold of him as an adult.
Creative Writing Task:
1. Write a list of emotions your character goes through in the course of your story.
If you like, you can use Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart Resource to really drill down on exactly what your character might be feeling.
2. Assign each emotion on your list a creature you could use to represent it. It could be animals from reality, a mythical creature, or something more amorphous like Jude’s beasts.
For example, your list might look like this:
Shame: a toad with a long tongue
Contentment: a sleeping cat
Rage: a demon
3. Write a passage using zoomorphism to explore the internal struggles (or high points!) of your character.
Tip: If you want to explore the idea of external and internal stakes further, take a look at Shawn Coyne’s breakdown of Internal Genres.