Classic tragedy is an archetypal plot form that resides in our collective unconscious, but your readers will also be powerfully moved by a story about someone who overcomes the kind of tragedy that occurs in real life. This kind of hero begins in tragedy and ends in triumph, and is someone your readers can relate to.
Tragedy can strike at any time. The loss of a child is the worst blow a parent can suffer, while for a child it is the loss of a parent. A family can lose their home. A person or family can lose their country, and have to refugee to a foreign land because of war, famine, or plague.
If the event can be completely healed, it isn't really a tragedy: if insurance will pay for a house to be rebuilt, losing it to flood, fire, or tornado--as long as the inhabitants are not too badly injured to heal--is just one of life's setbacks. That's a different kind of story. To produce the greatest obstacle for your protagonist to overcome, and the most powerful emotional experience for your reader, a tragedy in this sense is something that cannot be reversed.
A good way to research is to read stories of people who have overcome tragedy in real life. No, you don't just retell their stories, you take inspiration from them to create your own plot. The most important element in a story of overcoming tragedy is the epiphany--the turning-point event that sets the person who suffered the tragedy on the road to creating a "new normal" for his or her life, so even though something irreplaceable has been lost,a full life and happiness are still possible.
We all want to believe that we would have the strength to survive a tragedy and find our way back to happiness. That's why we enjoy reading about people who do so. They may have to cope with lasting effects, and learn to live life in a wheelchair or with a guide dog, but they find a way to live a full life anyway.
Every story begins with the protagonist's conflict, but in a story about overcoming tragedy the conflict is the worst imaginable thing that could happen to your protagonist. Once again, he or she will never be able to put things back the way they were. This is a story of the triumph of the human spirit, something that doesn't happen in a day. Take your hero to the lowest depths, and then through the grieving process to arrive at the end physically or emotionally scarred, but stronger for the experience.
Copyright 2010 by Jean Lorrah.
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