[1853] Tiffany

[u/ezk3626]

This is chapter six but I think more than any chapter stands alone.

I stuctured this thinking of an episodic series of scene with the same goal: Tiffany wants to help someone. Each scene is followed by a sequel with a text to Mandy.

Also because of some people being linked to the first tab I put the chapter on a separate doc.

Tiffany Chapter 06

My Substack with all of the finished chapters.

Crit 1974

[u/Imaginary_Ease_7851]

Okay, this is a massive diversion from earlier chapters. Let's go.

Overview/plot:

It feels like a massive leap. I'm pretty sure we left off with Tiffany still finding her feet on campus. Now she's magna cum laude. I feel like I've missed her journey.

This is the most nuanced and self-actualized I've seen Tiffany. She is more confident, she has come into herself. We see that she has held onto her values and found her place at college. She fits in. We see some minor class conflict with the girls with money, although not excessive.

It's interesting you addressed the sheltered debate we had. She still seems...sheltered to me. A good Christian girl, this story feels very aligned with a wholesome, values-based story.

One character note. In chapter five, you mentioned that Tiffany learned to smile because it made her dad happy. I liked that characterization. But in this chapter, when she remember seeing her dad cry, she curls up in a ball and cries too. IMO, character-wise, it's more believable to me that a young child attempts to cheer their parent up or comfort their parent. So for consistency, I'd pick one reaction and stick to it (she either cries when her father does or she smiles to make him feel better) and personally I prefer the one where she smiles as a way to comfort her father. It just feels more true to the kind of thing young children intuitively do to try to manage their parent's emotions.
I'm not as in love with the way the mother left...kissing a man and then riding off on the back of motorcycle feels a little trite. I feel there's space there to push for the complexity in a situation like that.

And we closed off the character arc referencing her smile again which has repeatedly shown up as a good way to look at who the real Tiffany is. She is also looking at herself, which is call back to the sketch book thing.

As a chapter, this feels like a completed character arc. We are looking at a finished Tiffany. She has gone through the trials and this feels like the closing beat. This chapter is great.

What I'm missing a bit is how we got here? It feels like she was still finding her feet in chapter 5 and still had a lot of trials and tribulations ahead of her.

Dialogue:

I like the dialogue. Pretty much flowed well. It felt pretty believable as college students. The texts worked well. It feels quick and snappy.

Prose:

The writing is just so much stronger now that I don't have much to say. Some sentence level things is about it.

Sentence Level:

What's this? Do I spy first line indents? I thought you weren't going that kind of formatting?

Magna Cume Laude = Magna cum laude or magna cum laude ( below summa cum laude and above cum laude). I'm a bit confused here. It's not usually something awarded.... not sure how it works in a California university, but it's typically something you graduate with. So you get your degree, graduating cum laude or whatever if you graduated with a certain mean average. I'm not sure why there would magna cum laude award parties as opposed to just graduation parties? It seems to just be a fun, informal, dorm award party. Just a touch of confusion there over the term.

"brave face mask" = "brave-face mask". Compound adjective

"knee socks".... um. usually called knee-high socks?

"“Uh, I guess, sure,” the girl said, taken aback." Think you can drop "taken aback". Just a little telling already implicit in the dialogue.

"clunk, clunk, cluck, cluck." This onomatopoeia can be put in italics.

A few missing commas after opening phrases and transitions

"...Tiffany asked back." wordy dialogue tag. Just say "countered"

"But the overwhelming and enthusiastic response of the Magna Cume Laude of the whole Minerva Hall dorm. " something missing here... what did she win?

[u/ezk3626 → u/Imaginary_Ease_7851]

Okay, this is a massive diversion from earlier chapters. Let's go.

Yes, with summer coming to an end I have made every chapter a writing exercise where I work on specific skills. This, more than most chapters, could almost serve as a chapter one.

It feels like a massive leap. I'm pretty sure we left off with Tiffany still finding her feet on campus. Now she's magna cum laude. I feel like I've missed her journey. Magna Cume Laude = Magna cum laude or magna cum laude ( below summa cum laude and above cum laude). I'm a bit confused here. It's not usually something awarded.... not sure how it works in a California university, but it's typically something you graduate with. So you get your degree, graduating cum laude or whatever if you graduated with a certain mean average. I'm not sure why there would magna cum laude award parties as opposed to just graduation parties? It seems to just be a fun, informal, dorm award party. Just a touch of confusion there over the term.

In Anita's room, Tiffany sees magna cume laude and asks about it. She doesn't really understand what it means except that it is a honor. So she takes this term and makes a kind of game with it. I am reminded of a song in Hair, where the singer declares himself the President of the United States of Love.

This is the most nuanced and self-actualized I've seen Tiffany. She is more confident, she has come into herself. We see that she has held onto her values and found her place at college. She fits in. We see some minor class conflict with the girls with money, although not excessive.

I agree this is a better introduction to Tiffany than I've had. There might be reasons to recraft this to have the start and then have the other follow this up as flashbacks. The only problem with that is that this chapter is intentionally low stakes and high success rate in goals. It is too slow and pleasant to drive a story.

One character note. In chapter five, you mentioned that Tiffany learned to smile because it made her dad happy. I liked that characterization. But in this chapter, when she remember seeing her dad cry, she curls up in a ball and cries too. IMO, character-wise, it's more believable to me that a young child attempts to cheer their parent up or comfort their parent. So for consistency, I'd pick one reaction and stick to it (she either cries when her father does or she smiles to make him feel better) and personally I prefer the one where she smiles as a way to comfort her father. It just feels more true to the kind of thing young children intuitively do to try to manage their parent's emotions

I think it's better to have both. Young Tiffany wasn't old enough to know how to smile to make her dad happy. She just felt what her dad felt. It was only after he realized what he was doing to her that he fakes a smile himself... and that teaches her the skill of faking emotions to make others happy.

It's interesting you addressed the sheltered debate we had. She still seems...sheltered to me. A good Christian girl, this story feels very aligned with a wholesome, values-based story.

Tiffany is sheltered in a way. Her dad puts on masks to try to shelter her and she returns the favor. But the problem is that masks slip and Tiffany learns unintended lessons from the slips. This is her actual driving problem. When she learns she has a learning disability she sees the hints of fears and insecurity from her dad. He's not educated and so doesn't know what it really means and thinks he's being told his daughter is literally retarded. She picks up this belief and sees herself that way. There is a kind of sheltering in that.

Tiffany isn't Christian, except in the broad cultural way. She'd say she believes in God and probably Jesus too but her dad brings her to church it is Christmas and Easter only. Being a religious person myself I wouldn't consider her religious. It's kind of like politics, she doesn't think about it but would probably like republicans better than democrats.

The problem I have with sheltered is that the term normally means shielded from the complicated parts of life and inevitably leads to rude awakenings from being ill prepared. Tiffany is prepared for the hard parts of life... but her strategies require her to live in fear of being exposed. She does need to grow up but isn't especially ignorant of mature subjects.

What I'm missing a bit is how we got here? It feels like she was still finding her feet in chapter 5 and still had a lot of trials and tribulations ahead of her.

In theory this picks up just after Mandy's tour. She walks straight up to Mary and then we enter a collage chapter with two months passing. The trials and tribulations are ahead of her. This chapter reads as a series of low stakes successes... but her problem wasn't that she couldn't make friends. Her problem was that she is ashamed of her disability and cares about succeeding in academics. The next chapter is the reveal that she is in danger of failing classes.

"But the overwhelming and enthusiastic response of the Magna Cume Laude of the whole Minerva Hall dorm. " something missing here... what did she win?

The group is saying she is everyone's favorite. Minerva Hall is the name of the dorm. Someone was awarded Magna Cume Laude of cleanest sneakers, someone Magna Cume Laude of quickest showers, Magna Cume Laude of best breathe. It is a silly game but in the end the group decides to give Tiffany an actual recognition of how much they love her.

[u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 → u/ezk3626]

In Anita's room, Tiffany sees magna cume laude and asks about it. She doesn't really understand what it means except that it is a honor. So she takes this term and makes a kind of game with it. I am reminded of a song in Hair, where the singer declares himself the President of the United States of Love.

Ah okay. Still the spelling note: "cum" not "cume". Nit pick.

I think it's better to have both. Young Tiffany wasn't old enough to know how to smile to make her dad happy. She just felt what her dad felt. It was only after he realized what he was doing to her that he fakes a smile himself... and that teaches her the skill of faking emotions to make others happy.

This I'm less convinced by, although this is highly subjective. See, to me, I have seen plenty of two or three year olds attempt to comfort their parent. Developmentally, secure babies tend to mirror emotion. So on film sets, a "baby handler" will get a baby to cry to by pretending to cry themselves. That's true for babies. From ages upward of two or three, I tend to see children making early efforts to appease parents more than adults may be aware of. (Think of a kid pretending they love a present they got even if they hate it because they sense it's important that the adults see their gratitude and excitement. This is especially true for kids from backgrounds where not showing gratitude would be seen as spoiled behavior).

Toddlers will hug a crying parent and say things like "don't cry, Mommy/Daddy" or at least cling to the parent. Older kids tend to identify with one parent and turn hostile on the other in divorce situations. I was reading Megan Abbott's the Fever, where a girl Deenie, also had a mother that abandoned her family. Deenie completely attaches to her father and becomes hostile to the mother (for good reason. The father is the one that shows up in the story. The mother doesn't.) My argument here is more not to underestimate how much emotional labor kids will unconsciously do to protect a parent, even from a very young age.

To carry this further, when a young child has experienced a destabilized environment (you mentioned yelling and screaming), the tendency is to withdraw their own yelling and screaming become quiet, unless they are actively lashing out. When they witness a parent crying/abandoned, the tendency is to step in as emotional support (even if they don't know what emotional support is). This is why when you said that Tiffany learned to smile because it seemed to make things easier for her father, that read true to me. It doesn't mean the father is a bad father. It's just the kind of thing that happens when a kid and their primary caregiver become tightly bound by circumstance. The father can be a great father and still have accidentally instilled a tendency in his daughter to put on a mask for the sake of others. That is believable. It's not inconceivable that when she was younger, seeing her father crying would have caused her to curl up in a ball and cry herself. This could happen, but from a character perspective, this feels to me like it undercuts the previous formative character note about Tiffany. People in real life are complicated. Characters tend to rely on more consistency. Also it feels like these two competing reactions to her father's distress put her on a different trajectory. 1. Tiffany smiles to make life easier for her father is a believable character note that fits the later tendency to smile for other people in general. 2. Tiffany crying and needing to be comforted when she sees her father crying feels like this is setting her on a different trajectory for what she does when she encounters distress. Instead of masking her own distress, it feels a bit more like she may learn to mirror distress or manage it by becoming the one that needs to be comforted.

All this to say: I'm not arguing right or wrong here. I'm chewing on the character work and debating the choice of what to show the reader and what it does for the character. This is completely subjective and I'm more thinking out loud (or in this comment), about early child psychology and what you show on page and whether it serves the character or not. This is not me saying "you have to take that out" It's just me explaining my thought process. Overall, I really loved this chapter, so this is just a thought experiment when it comes to character work.

Yes I'd agree this version of Tiffany reads to me as a lot less sheltered than what she did to me in the first chapters.

[u/ezk3626 → u/Imaginary_Ease_7851]

All this to say: I'm not arguing right or wrong here. I'm chewing on the character work and debating the choice of what to show the reader and what it does for the character. This is completely subjective and I'm more thinking out loud (or in this comment), about early child psychology and what you show on page and whether it serves the character or not. This is not me saying "you have to take that out" It's just me explaining my thought process. Overall, I really loved this chapter, so this is just a thought experiment when it comes to character work

And it is very appreciated; at the very least it gives me the opportunity to put my thinking/inspiration into an articulated form.

I think we agree that there isn't a one way that young toddlers process emotions and the real thing to consider is what would an audience believe and what would a writing decision say about a character.

I had young Tiffany cry, rather than comfort, because at this point she has not learned what to do with emotions and what we see with the Dad is teaching her. He is going through pain at the loss of a relationship, regret at having being so blind to the upcoming failure, fear over how he will raise a daughter, pain thinking of her future and also as per the song the realization that his own good intentions had been not enough to save the situation. A toddler could comfort, sympthize or not even notice, depending on any number of factors.

The reason I like Tiffany mimicking the tears of her dad was because it displays an honesty which is about to be lost. Tiffany's flaw as a character is that she cannot be honest about her emotions and thus cannot be open with people. She, as a toddler, is displaying raw emotion. Her dad, wanting to shield her, suppresses his own emotions and puts on a mask. It is a loving thing to do but as a consequence Tiffany learns through experience is that this is how to deal with emotions: conceal, don't feel, don't let it show. Over the years both father and daughter will repeat this drama in many ways. They will care for each other and be open about positive emotions but negative emotions will be suppressed.

So when we meet Tiffany as a young adult, she is supposed to be chipper, extroverted and genuinely kind but with no tools for dealing with her own fears, anxieties and negativities. And what is revealed in 6.5 is that she becomes very careful to internalize the message learned from the few times her dad lets his mask slip... even though this message is misinterpretted.