I was consoling Toast this morning, and thinking about the necessity of putting her and the other cats through a brief separation to make their lives better. She just knows that suddenly! I don’t love her! Why? And also, this isn’t the good gooshy fud. (note: the good stuff is in smaller containers and they munch through it faster than the other, I wanted to feed them the bigger amount this morning. I alternate it anyway, and she expresses her opinion every time).

The cats are in a temporary quarantine while the house is treated for fleas, because unusually wet spring coupled with Texas heat meant that over the course of the last week we had a population explosion, and despite the cats having their monthly treatment, life was… going to find a way. When I was picking up supplies to deal with the invading invertebrates in about six ways, the need to go to two stores and a conversation with a checkout clerk about the empty shelves told me we aren’t the only household with this issue. The house was treated yesterday, and now I’m cleaning it like mad to be sure it’s safe for the cats to re-enter. In the meantime, they are getting cuddles, just not home.

Which has me thinking about parenting, and how difficult it is to require a young child (or for that matter a cat, albeit a lesser pang) to go through a hardship. You the parent may know that it will be better for them on the other side of a move, an illness, a shot… but the little one does not. They cry, and cling, and in time forget mostly about it, if you’ve been there to console them and support them while they process the pain. Parenting requires a firm resolution to not give in too soon, and spoil the progress of the child’s growth. Cats, fortunately, I can spoil rotten as they will never mature (much of the appeal of pets!).

As an author, I write a story plotting all manner of hard things for my characters to live through. If you think about it, most plot conflicts are us authorial types inflicting pain on characters to see how they handle it. Which is pretty darn sadistic, put like that. About how I felt with a cat leaning on me, looking in my face, making soft interrogative noises that could easily be interpreted as ‘what did I do wrong? Don’t you love me any more?’ while I cuddled her. The cats will be back home in a matter of hours. The characters… may never come home again.

Which is where I’ve seen stories fall down on characterization. This is a profound impact on a person, to have their world upended. Yes, largely we write thinking, aware, logical beings with agency in at least some of what is happening to them. Even so, there will be emotional repercussions they (and often, the author) did not reck with. This isn’t something they can blow off in a day, or a week, it is liable to have resonant ripples of effect down an entire lifetime (and beyond as their children and grandchildren pick up behaviors and mindsets from them, look at the Great Depression aftermath). Yes, in the course of a novel you are hardly going to explore all of that. You absolutely need to acknowledge it in some fashion, or your story is going to come across flat, unrealistic, and improbable to the reader, even if the reader may not be able to put into words why they aren’t connecting with the character.

It is not necessary to dwell on this, if your story isn’t about the inner life of a character. It’s better not to dwell, for you and the character, frankly. You do need to acknowledge it – even if what you point out in subtle ways is that the character is refusing to allow it to impinge on them and what they must do for survival – and this can be done in small insertions of emotion, dialogue, and action descriptions that can be words or sentences, not entire paragraphs or chapters. In the aftermath of a large change to their life it is an important part of conveying the impact on their emotions and mindset. We as readers like to see an emotional growth arc along the book or series, and this is one way to depict that set of curves, because it’s not like the action curve which tends to resemble the bell curve. Lows and highs, just like real life. Also, ending on a high note in one book doesn’t mean you can’t start the next book with the hero struggling (not, I’ll add hastily here, broken and despondent) with the aftereffects of the winning battle that ended the last book. This is real, and readers will appreciate it.

But for me, I have one room left to clean and make ready for the cat’s return, and then days of consoling to help them understand that all is well, now. At least unless we have to do this again (hopefully not… at least not to this level although the ongoing preventatives shall continue). I know Toast will forgive me. Some of the characters I’ve written? Well it is probably good they can’t give me a piece of their minds.