Writing Excuses - 15

     

Homework: Think of an emotion that contrasts, or foils, the primary emotion in the thing you were working on for the last homework. Identify that, and begin exploring it as a sub-plot.

The primary foil for all three stories I explored earlier is detachment. Each of those narratives, Fleabag, EEAAO, and NOTW, is rooted in the messiness of grief, longing, and love. To feel is to risk being broken, but the alternative, detachment, offers a different kind of story: one where survival means refusing to feel at all.

In Fleabag, detachment would look like silence. Instead of her radical honesty and connection through breaking the fourth wall, imagine her doing the opposite: numbing out, hiding, refusing to feel her feelings thoroughly. A Fleabag who never meets the audience’s gaze. A woman who covers her pain with distance, avoids eye contact, and shrinks from intimacy. This version of her story asks: what does it cost us to be avoidant? What happens when vulnerability is replaced with withdrawal? We might protect ourselves from immediate pain, but we lose the possibility of real connection.

In Everything Everywhere All At Once, detachment becomes nihilism. If nothing matters in any universe, then why bother? This is embodied in Joy's despair; the temptation to dissolve into the void rather than wrestle with meaning. Where Evelyn ultimately chooses to embrace absurdity with kindness, detachment would choose indifference instead. A character who doesn’t laugh, doesn’t cry, who lets go of caring altogether. The danger here isn’t chaos but emptiness, a hollow life where nothing is worth the risk of love.

In The Name of the Wind, detachment is the denial of longing. Kvothe’s story burns with desire (for love, mastery, belonging), and that fire drives everything he becomes. But imagine a character who chooses the opposite: who severs themselves from desire to avoid the ache of not having. If I don’t reach, I cannot fail. If I don’t love, I cannot lose. This form of detachment turns every man into an island, untouched but also unloved. Safety comes at the expense of aliveness.

Together, these foils circle the same question: is it better to feel deeply, even if it breaks us, or to cut ourselves off in the name of survival? Detachment promises protection, but at the cost of intimacy, joy, and meaning. The stories I love insist that brokenness is not the enemy of love; it is the doorway into it. And perhaps the greatest risk is not in being shattered, but in never allowing ourselves to feel at all.