Everyone you love is bound to hurt you at some point. It’s the double-edged sword of intimacy: the more you love someone, the sharper the sting of betrayal.
I started taking an acting class with Julia Ryan. As a fiction writer, I’m always trying to make my characters more believable. Who better to learn from than actors? In our first class, Julia pulled five people aside and gave them instructions. They stood in front of the class and did what they were told. When asked to guess what they were doing, we yelled out, “He’s waiting at a bus stop, and the bus is late” and “She’s at a stadium, looking for a player on the field. She’s pissed. Her team is losing.”
It turned out they were given simple tasks like count the number of people in the class or survey the types of shoes worn. “We are assumption-making machines,” said Julia. Actors perform, but the audience does most of the work in imbuing their actions with meaning.
The third week, we paired up and worked on “spare scenes” where we were given nonsensical dialogue between A and B and had to come up with the who, what, where, when, and why. Classic scene building exercise. What surprised me, though, was how deeply I had to figure out my character in order to appear believable. It wasn’t enough for me to know that my scene partner was a Democratic campaign manager and I was a Republican fundraiser who flipped parties, and that we were exes, but I also had to decide who I was raising money for (this was really tough) and how much I was getting paid. These were important details even if they weren’t in the scene. Simply knowing these answers allows an actor to deliver their lines with more conviction. More situational specificity, more conviction. More conviction, more believable.
The same is true in fiction. Sharp specifics that reveal not just a character’s psychology but their sociocultural context are what make them feel like a real person. The danger in omitting these details is that the reader then fills in the gaps with their own assumptions and biases.
Even a sentence like “She walked to the grocery store” requires some cultural context. What a grocery store is like, what challenges walking presents, perhaps an entire setting can be called to mind in the gaps between words and the way those gaps are filled in by a reader’s personal and cultural assumptions.
— Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping
Outside of fiction, we’ve all experienced the way assumptions can lead us regrettably astray. At work, I made a passing joke to K. This was based on the assumption that he had a piece of information from R which, it turned out, he did not. What was meant to be a lighthearted moment quickly turned awkward. He thought R was spreading rumors about him. Wanting to be honest about my mistake, I told R about the incident and apologized. But my apology felt useless: it couldn’t undo the damage. I’ve been in R’s shoes before and was annoyed at myself for breaking my own cardinal rule: consider how your actions impact other people’s relationships. Assumptions are unthinking.
When we’re on the receiving end of a mistake like this, and we feel hurt or even betrayed, we tend to make up stories about the friend who broke our trust. We imbue their actions with meaning. Strong, painful feelings have no refuge, so we create a narrative to justify how we feel. That’s why a simple, immediate apology—I’m sorry, I won’t do it again—doesn’t make us feel better because it doesn’t provide additional context to correct the narrative we’ve created. It doesn’t explain why they did what they did and why they’re sorry about it.
Anger and resentment can feel oddly cathartic, and it can be tempting to shut down and disengage from the person who hurt us. It’s important to take space to process our feelings, but ultimately, if it’s an important relationship, a conversation needs to happen where each person shares their experience honestly.
Rebuilding trust requires being open to the possibility that there’s a different story than the one we’re telling ourselves. Often, there’s missing context that helps to explain why someone acted (or reacted) the way they did. Through storytelling comes understanding and through understanding comes healing.
Everyone you love is bound to hurt you at some point. But the vast majority of the time it’s unintentional. They made the wrong assumptions.
I had never thought about the fact that 'walking to the grocery store' would convey very different context to different people. That kind of makes any book a sort of 'choose your path' story...slightly different for each reader...