📚 Write On! Never mind Juliet's whys and wherefores?

Hello writers,​

​     I adapted this from something else, so it’ll run long. Feel free as always to skip straight down to the CHALLENGE if you prefer!

   Okay, so, the question —Juliet‘s, in fact— when she asks, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?“ she’s not asking his location in the garden below her bedroom balcony, right? She’s asking, “hey, boyfriend, upon what grounds/basis d’ya gotta keep bein’ of the Montagu family yer born in, seeing as it’s enemies with the family I’m born in?”

     We know that’s the question because next she tells him:

deny thy father and refuse thy name. 🌿 Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

  So we know the “where” in her wherefore asks “from what cause/what made him (past-tense) a Montagu: how come ... where’d this state of affairs come from.

   That’s a different “why” than asking toward what effects or purposes or goals - or for what reason - the “what for”.

    (Some R&J fans say Juliet is  asking Romeo his purpose/goal in being a scion of the rival house. But, if he hadn’t come from/been born into it in the first place, that question couldn’t arise. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ tuit.)

   The tension between the 2 different kinds of “why” gives great action potential, because characters have to go somewhere(s) with a story, after first having to start/come from somewhere else. Sometimes whether they like it or not! Clawing, kicking, screaming, and whatnot. Or singing…​

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    All the resultant motion and commotion empowers the plot with strong (“compelling”) plausible (“believable”) events, thoughts & dialogues, impulses of the moment, desires (often conflicting) and drives that everything around the characters pushes back on, because whatever is  —inertia, status quo of the moment & place, in whichever moment and place— is usually what the physics of environment and other people favor. But not our protags.

     Protag characters are a pain in the patoot to status quo because it’s not nearly enough for what they want out of life OR it’s causing them huge pain, drastic trouble, or all sorts of other pushes away from what it and they were.

     And there are rewards/pay-offs/ incentives pulling them in the directions they’re headed now. Even if only trying to get back home again. (And you know what they say about that.)

   Then stuff happens to them that they have to deal with, that can also reshape what incentives/goals/futures they can believe in themselves, because severe experiences tend to change people in both clear and subtle ways.

    Of course, they might still try to keep going in the original direction they felt pulled, because of habit or unwillingness to cut their losses.

   Or they might get disillusioned and just drift a while, or they might feel pulled toward somewhere/something else that feels SO much better … or as if it was what they really meant to all along (like cats falling off the back of the sofa). Or maybe they didn’t have their act together enuf to realize it or weren’t skilled enuf to chart a course straight toward. Or the whatever they were headed for seems to’ve SHIFTED out of reach, as if its nearness was a mirage...

h/t ynohtnA

   Econopolitical digression: I only just now realized how very dialectical-materialist fiction is: thesis, antithesis, synthesis=new thesis, antithesis…

  Anyway, R&J’s story is all about people consumed, driven & pushed by the from-what-initial-causes and pulled toward the rewards/goals they hope for, many characters at cross purposes, a grand, complex mess.

   Sometimes, of course, the story is as simple as a little kid asking, “Why is the sky blue?” S/he’s probably not wondering what the sky was trying to accomplish —not for/push/toward-what-goal/purpose is the sky blue— but how come it’s that nice color: how did it come to be that way.

    In an era with sky so often the color of cardboard, a kid asking how come the sky is that color might get a real simple one-word “reason”: it’s from smog.

   Naturally a little kid will then ask, “Why/how come there’s smog?” We explain, “Because it’s crud in the air from the vehicles and industry of people who don’t care about what comes from what they do.” So the little kid asks, “Why?” So we hafta answer, if we’re honest, “the industries wouldn’ta got huge enuf to produce that effect if people everywhere hadn’ta been avid or else desperate for —pulling for— the life-improving and pleasing products of industry...”

   Such as fast cars. Pfui! as Nero Wolfe would say. But hey, if R&J’s neighborhood had had a fast car to joy-ride in, they might notta bin pulled/attracted to going someplace else and taking poison to try to set things up to make everything come out right … on the other hand, they might’ve just wrapped the car around a bridge abutment, so who knows.

   And now, after so much covid19 lockdown, the kid asks how come the sky is bluer? Ha! That’s how. (In California, it’s mostly cardboard again, and reeks.)

   The probability of multiple how-comes and what-fors are worth a writer’s consideration on a few bases. E.g., [a] news shows and courtroom drama and authority/tative voices childhood onward —teachers, culture, religion, whatnot— drill into us a kneejerk assumption that there’s only ever one “real” “reason” (not specifying a push-reason or pull-reason) people do something, but people aren’t actually like that — ask any psychologist how conflicted real people are. [b] a simple push or pull doesn’t give writers a lot to work with for devising an unpredictable yet inevitable story pulling readers out of their daily life and sweeping them into another realm that’s hell on the characters but great to read in. [c] It follows that the more pushes & pulls on the characters, the easier the writer’s job because those forces create so much natural trouble that the writer only has to keep up with the characters and write it all down. (ymmv)

CHALLENGES: yer choice!

<big>Pick a pivotal moment you recall somewhere in Romeo & Juliet, (or West Side Story) or any well-known story, fairy-tale, movie, ballad, etc., and rewrite it so things woulda gone in a completely different direction from there on out.

For example, in the guys’ crowd-fight scene of R&J, if they’d all been armed only with cocktail toothpicks instead of swords, Tybalt wouldn’ta been able to kill Romeo’s best bud Mercutio, so Romeo wouldn’ta wanted let alone been able to kill Tybalt in revenge.

They’d all have probably just tickled each other silly jabbing around with the toothpicks, and ended up in the nearest pub all singing dirty football songs until last call, no need for acts IV & V, no melodrama, no tragedy, The End! :)

or

<big>Having failed at something, Callow Youth & Stout Companion (or characters in your WIP) argue about what they’re really after or should be or shouldn’t, and the costs vs rewards of leaving things as they are vs keeping going,</big>

OR...

ALTERNATE CHALLENGE: Sing along with G&S!

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