Do You Write Mirrors or Arrows?

In a post on Writer Unboxed, Donald Maass says that writers can benefit from taking a “moral inventory” that clarifies their view of the human experience. What does that inventory look like? Maass asks these questions, for which you can choose only one answer. You cannot answer “both.”

• What factor most produces success, security and happiness: Randomness and luck, or effort and reward?
• What is more important to have: means or virtue?
• Which better describes you: warrior or survivor?
• Do you see you self as more: strongly enduring or courageously fighting?
• What better describes your life’s mission: to rescue or to win?
• What is more important to do: preserve what is good or change what is bad?
• What is the better goal: to do justice or to practice forgiveness?
• What we face every day is mostly: peril or opportunity?
• What is better to have: individual freedom or group cooperation?
• Which is better to have: faith or reason?
• What guides you is: mainly God or mainly yourself?
• Works of fiction should primarily show us: how we are or what we should do?

When you’re done, you should have a list of words or terms that reveal how you see yourself and the human condition. The final question is especially important to your writing, as it reveals your unconscious intention, Maass says.

Maass divides stories into two categories: mirrors and arrows. “Those terms represent the two primary aims of fiction, which are either to 1) reflect our condition and tell us who we are, or 2) show us our possibilities and point us to who we can be,” he explains. “Those contrary intentions in turn tend to lead to two fundamentally different story types: stories of fate or stories of destiny.”

In stories of fate, things happen to characters. They are challenged and may feel trapped. The struggle, survive, endure, heal, and find hope and forgiveness. In stories of destiny, characters chase a task to bring about change. They know what to do, but sometimes fail. They face their fears, prove themselves, and succeed.

While it’s possible a story could integrate the mirror and the arrow, this can muddy the message. “It isn’t that the writer isn’t pulling off both intentions, it’s more that the writer isn’t consciously committed to a clear intention in the first place,” Maass notes. As a result, whatever the writer feels about the story doesn’t come through to the reader. 

Maass divides the answers to his 12 questions into mirror and arrow categories, suggesting that the category where most of your answers fall captures your fundamental mindset and outlook. What if you – like me – are 50/50? That’s not a problem in the real world, but your characters may require you to make more deliberate choices, rather than simply going with your gut.

To put this concept into practice, Maass suggests starting with your antagonist goal. Who wants your hero to fail? “The advantage of this approach—at the planning stage anyway—is that it removes responsibility for enacting your story intention from the protagonist,” he writes. “What can be a muddle of intentions can instead become a struggle of one will against another, one principle over another.” He suggests more questions to ask:

1. What does your protagonist stand for? What is the opposite of that?
2. What value or virtue is primary for your protagonist? What is wrong, weak and contemptible about that?
3. In what way does your antagonist find your protagonist personally loathsome? How is your protagonist a hateful type?
4. What is the worst thing that your antagonist would like to do to your protagonist? What steps would it take to get there?

For your protagonist, ask:

• What is your protagonist’s personal weak spot—that which your protagonist dislikes about himself, herself or themselves?
• What your protagonist stands for—see above—is what your protagonist will defend.
• What is the trap or choice which your protagonist would hate to face and would do anything to avoid?
• What is the threat, loss, cost or temptation that would cause your protagonist to buckle?

“The stronger are your antagonist’s belief, prejudice and plan, the more we likely will hope—and hopefully cheer for—the opposite value and virtue, embodied in your protagonist, to prevail,” Maass writes. “More simply, it is easier to demonstrate what is bad and wrong than it is to wave a flag for what is good and worthy. Protagonists tend to mire in nuance, realism and back story. Antagonists don’t have that problem. They are a useful compass for your story’s moral map. And maybe your own.”