Today’s the day that the days get longer than the nights, and the sun is shining, and my hyacinths are smelling sweetly, and it’s time to sow seeds, and all over social media people are celebrating the joys of spring.

But – and I don’t want to spoil the party – for some reason lately I can’t get away from the idea of suffering. Maybe it’s taking a meditation course, where we’re paying attention to such things. Or maybe it’s hearing yet another story of someone’s sickness, or reading another story about war. Or maybe I’ve just become a winter person. But just because the sun is shining a little longer today, it doesn’t mean suffering is going away. The cycle is just turning.

Also, I’ve come to feel suffering is probably a more substantial and authentic driver for story than conflict. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: conflict is a primary engine in certain sorts of stories (war stories, crime stories, etc.). And it probably features somewhere in most stories in some fashion or other. But conflict feels overemphasised as the core principle of stories, and especially in cookie-cutter creative writing classes. No wonder there’s so much conflict in the world! And no wonder so much writing feels a bit formulaic. Let’s defer to St Ursula (again):

Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing’
– Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft

So how does change take shape in our stories? Experiencing change – or impermanence – is, after all, one of those facts of life that Buddhist teachings say we can’t avoid, and change usually leads to joys as well as suffering, major and minor.

Buddhist teachings also acknowledge suffering as a basic fact of existence; sometimes the idea is translated in a less catastrophic and more everyday fashion as dissatisfaction.

Much suffering is attributed to three ‘root poisons’: hatred, greed, and ignorance. So if we want to avoid suffering for ourselves and others, how might we reduce their presence in our lives?

And to prove I’m not a complete misery-guts, let’s note that these afflictions also have opposite virtues identified as the ‘beneficial roots’ of joy: love, generosity, and understanding. By contrast, how might we nurture these qualities?

Because my default mode is to think about writing and stories, I began to consider the ways in which these descriptions of suffering offer story arcs for our characters, and used these for writing experiments in the masterclass on Character earlier this month.

So for hatred and its related qualities:

• How might anger feature in the lives of characters?
• How might they have been pushed away or rejected?
• And what might they themselves push away or feel aversion towards?
• What might they be running away from?
• How might they be driven by fear?
• How might self-loathing, shame or guilt drive their actions?
• What pain have they experienced?
• What wounds do they carry, and how might they have injured others?

And thinking about the opposite quality of love:

• Where does their open-heartedness begin?
• And where might it be challenged?
• What acts of kindness do they perform?
• And what sort of benevolence has been shown towards them?
• How might they show compassion in relieving the suffering of others?
• And how might compassion be shown towards them at times of need?
• How do they show love to others, and how do others share love with them?

Thinking about the root poison of greed:

• How might your characters be defined by attachment?
• What are their desires, and how do they shape their stories?
• And how are they affected by the desires of other people?
• What do they crave or grab or grasp for?
• And what do they cling on to?
• And thinking about attachment in a more positive way: what might characters in fact gain from holding on to, or committing to?
• It occurs to me that too often in less successful stories characters’ commitments or desires don’t really feel earned: so: how do characters earn whatever they gain or lose?

And by contrast, exploring the idea of nonattachment:

• What is the role of generosity in their stories: what are they given, and what do they give to others?
• What freedom might they enjoy in letting go or giving things away?
• What sacrifices have they made in the past, and might they have to make in the future?

And to consider the root poison of ignorance:

• How are your characters’ lives numbed out by what they don’t know?
• How do misunderstandings cloud their relationships and experiences of the world?
• How might your characters be deluded, or held back by illusions?
• How might indifference or inertia shape their lives?
• How might their stories be driven by doubt or uncertainty?
• What foolish decisions do they make?

And on the flip side of understanding:

• What might characters gain from knowing?
• How might their stories be informed by their increased awareness of the world around them?
• What do they come to appreciate?

I recently realised that hope doesn’t really feature in these reckonings of suffering! Which begs the questions:

• What is the role of hope in the story?
• And also its opposite: despair? Which can be crippling?

This gives me food for thought – about happy endings, which might be hoped for, but which in stories can so often feel trite: unearned or lazy, or simply not set up adequately. In fact, might the clinging and illusory aspects of hope stand in the way of characters seeing the simple joys in the world around them? And the happy ending is already here, and a character finally sees this.

‘There’s no place like home,’ says Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, whose journey takes her from doubt and ignorance to understanding and appreciation. It turns out her suffering and joy are actually bound up together in the same place – they just needed some unravelling and a bit of growing up, which of course required those adventures with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.

I don’t know that it’s necessary to use all of these frameworks: in fact, that might get overly complicated! But these are ideas that might help in developing clear narrative arcs or resolutions for what might at times be subtle storylines. The move from hatred to love, from attachment to freedom, from illusion to understanding: these are journeys that touch on all the big themes and deepen characterisation, and properly explored can bring depth to characterisation and storytelling. You could explore some of these questions in the manner of the notebook practice of Field Work or filling out a Character Questionnaire.

And a final question: how about doing a loving-kindness meditation for your characters: May you be free of suffering. What would that involve?

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My next masterclasses are on: Setting and Situation on 8 April, Story and Plot on 13 May, and Form and Structure on 10 June.

And I’ve blogged about suffering before in another context: Suffering for Your Art, aka Pull Yourself Together.