Buffalo Flats, Ep. 6: Misbelief
In this mini-episode, we switch things up! Anne-Marie defines what a misbelief is, how it connects your character’s internal and external journey, and we see the concepts in action in Martine Leavitt’s YA novel, Buffalo Flats.
Links:
A different kind of controlling belief in How to Trap a Tiger, MG by Tae Keller and Calvin, YA by Martine Leavitt.
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https://youtu.be/_pZ05IB0icc?si=oqciT8Jfj-t2HxjE
Anne-Marie Strohman: And if you can personify a potato in your story, I'm in awe.
Erin Nuttall: As you should be.
Anne-Marie Strohman: Welcome to the KidLit Craft Podcast. This season we're taking a deep dive into Martine Leavitt's YA Novel Buffalo Flats. Today our sixth episode is going to be a mini episode tackling a couple craft concepts related to the character's internal journey and misbelief.
I'm Anne-Marie Stroman and I write for children and young adults as well as short stories for adults.
Erin Nuttall: Hi, I'm Erin Nuttall, and I write for children and young adults focusing mostly on young adults.
Anne-Marie Strohman: In Kid Lit Craft, we look at mentor texts to discover the mechanics of how writers do what they do so we can apply it to our own writing.
Erin Nuttall: and as Anne-Marie said, we're studying Martine Leavitt's Buffalo Flats, which is a story, a historical fiction about Rebecca Leavitt, who lives in the Northwest Territories [1:00:00] of Canada and she wants more than anything to have a piece of her own land.
Anne-Marie Strohman: So today we're changing things up a little and Erin is going to ask me questions about craft today. Erin, I am ready.
Erin Nuttall: I feel heady with all of this power, I will tell you. So Anne-Marie let's start with vocabulary.
Anne-Marie Strohman: So I want to define two terms. It's really one concept with two names. So let's talk about the misbelief. This is something that the character believes about themselves or the world that's inaccurate, and it's typically something that they learned in childhood that's been reinforced by other experiences. Lisa Cron's craft book, Story Genius, talks a lot about the misbelief in the first section.
The other term you might hear that's related to this concept is controlling belief. Some people use controlling belief and misbelief interchangeably, and it's the belief that controls the character's behavior in the story and thus [2:00:00] controls the trajectory of the story. And it's what will need to change for the character to grow. So again both misbelief, controlling belief. I like the term misbelief.
Erin Nuttall: I do too. I think it makes sense and it's right there in it's name that it's something that is inaccurate and so that helps, me at least while I'm writing, to remember to include it and that it will need to change.
How does identifying a character's misbelief help you write your story?
Anne-Marie Strohman: Misbelief is important because it can give you a big clue to your character's internal journey. Characters, typically grow and change within the course of a story, but they still need to stay who they are. By focusing on one thing that they need to learn about themselves or the world through the story you can keep from making the character go through unrealistic transformations, by changing their character overall, and changing multiple things about their characters. [3:00:00]
Really, they're changing one big thing, one misbelief, one misunderstanding about themselves or the world, and it can also help you understand the external journey. What are the events outside that will create the pressure cooker your character needs to be able to change?
Erin Nuttall: Okay, that makes sense. So let's see an example. How does Martine use a misbelief in Buffalo Flats?
Anne-Marie Strohman: So in the last episode we talked about Rebecca's internal journey, and it's, in this case, it's one that she consciously pursues. She wants to be the person God wants her to be and she'll know she's achieved that when she can love other people. She has an image of what it means to love other people, and she holds up two people as ideals that she's trying to pursue.
Her mother and her best friend, LaRue. And both of these characters are people she sees as being the people God wants them to be. Being able to love other people without being disappointed [4:00:00] by those other people, or disgusted by those other people. And we see Rebecca both disappointed and disgusted by other people quite a lot.
So in this definition, she's definitely falling short. But Rebecca believes that her mother and LaRue are perfect, and that is part of her misbelief. She has kind of a combined one. In order to be the person, God wants her to be, she has to be perfect, and she mistakenly believes that her mother and LaRue are almost inhuman in their perfection. She has an idealized version of them and she believes that her perfect must look like their perfect. So she's got a whole lot in this misbelief mess about what it means to be the person God wants her to be.
Erin Nuttall: Right. And that's a common trap to at ourselves and look at other people and see our own flaws and their virtues. I think it's a great, realistic, misbelief that she has. So we talked last time how that misbelief [5:00:00] is reshaped both on seeing her mother and LaRue as more whole people. And they do really human things and they don't always fit into the ideal woman mold. And she also discovers her own capacity to love people.
Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, we saw this especially in the scene where she delivers the baby on her own. She delivers LaRue's baby sister and she cradles that baby and loves the world at that moment and then later she nurses the very sickest of the community during the outbreak.
People that she would've found the most disgusting and she's able to care for them in a loving way. So these twin ideas that mother and LaRue are human and that Rebecca has the capacity to care for others changes her misbelief.
So Erin, I think you have a quote about realizing that others are human. Could you share that with us?
Erin Nuttall: I do. I actually have two since we have two ideals. The first one is about LaRue. [6:00:00] And so LaRue turns out to be human because she, like Rebecca, is unmarried and she is in love with Rebecca's brother, Ammon. But LaRue and Ammon let things go a little far and LaRue gets pregnant.
And this is what Rebecca thinks after some pondering when she finds out about that experience she says, "LaRue had broken a commandment. LaRue and her brother, her own upright brother and her own perfect best friend. Why, she had thought LaRue so good! And now here she was, bad!"
Just a very black and white version. But then we see some growth, "But that wasn't right. Rebecca didn't know how, but she knew that was not right. If she knew one thing, she knew there was something singularly and profoundly loving and good in her friend. If she knew one thing in the whole world it was that LaRue was good. Rebecca's mind sorted. Everything she had thought was good and right seemed suddenly like phonics— [7:00:00] a set of rules someone had made up but didn't always apply. ... LaRue who was surely beloved of the Lord —she was the beautiful word that broke the rules, just so that you could see that it wasn't always the rules that were in charge of the world."
So that was her reassessment of what good looks like. And I think that's important because she does understand that God wants her to be good and prior to this like you were saying, good equals perfect. And here she is looking at the world a little differently. And then the next one is about her mother and her mother, in a very dramatic situation, her very good shot mother shoots a man and ends up having to go to jail and go to trial. It is a very exciting and dramatic part of the book. But after she is let off this is what Rebecca thinks about this, "As the wagon pulled away, Mother and Father sat high [8:00:00] up on the wagon seat and held their heads high. Mother had shot a man. Father had lied. And yet somehow they were Samuel and Eliza Leavitt still. Rebecca felt the mountains had been tipped upside down, balancing on their snowy tips, their roots floating up like ribbons toward the clouds. It was not such a bad feeling."
And so there are actually a few other things that Mother does to change Rebecca's view of her as perfect, but this is the most dramatic one. And as we know, Rebecca loves the mountains and they are her rock, literally and figuratively. And to have her rock of a mother do these unexpected things certainly flipped a switch inside her. But we hear it was not such a bad feeling.
Anne-Marie Strohman: So she goes from understanding perfect as following the rules to the letter to really the spirit [9:00:00] of caring and doing good in the community. And that might look weird, right? It might look unexpected. It might look like taking a skill, like shooting, and using it to protect other people in a way that harms someone.
Erin Nuttall: Right. For sure, because prior to that, Mother has used her skill with a shotgun to get food for the family. And then she did save an abused woman. And so while Rebecca was very much in favor of saving Sister Semple to have it happen that way and to play out that way was really unexpected and definitely made Rebecca change how she looked at her mother and at the world, and especially at herself and how she fit into that mold.
Anne-Marie Strohman: Martine's such an expert at pulling all these different threads together and making everything matter, right? Making the characters of Mother and LaRue be these different kinds of idealized versions, and then having Rebecca's [10:00:00] views of them change, and also to have those same characters helping her, being allies to her, and challenging her in different ways throughout the story. Ah, my mind explodes!
Erin Nuttall: That is the appropriate reaction. That is definitely how I felt reading this book.
So if we look at these changes that Rebecca has where she starts with her one misbelief and is able to shift to a new belief system by the end of the book, how does that journey relate to her external desire to have that piece of land? Because, as you said, Martine makes everything relate to each other, so I know it does.
Anne-Marie Strohman: Well, we can see practically that this external journey and this pursuit of getting land actually puts her in the way of learning some of these things. So for instance, she needs to earn money, her mother's a midwife, [11:00:00] it's a natural thing for her to help her mother with midwifery and she can earn money from that. And being a midwife, as we've seen with her delivering LaRue's baby sister, actually changes her. So the external journey and the things she's doing there puts her in the way of these internal changes and arguably the internal changes are more important than this external pursuit of land. But Martine puts those together so seamlessly.
Erin Nuttall: She does. And that is something that I think is helpful for us as writers to think about when we are creating our own stories. Because previous to Rebecca deciding she wanted to buy this land she helped her mom around the house, and she wandered the wilderness, and had a lot of free reign because of the fact that she was like the baby of the family.
By needing this almost impossible sum [12:00:00] of money and being so determined to have it it did, as you say, put her in situations where she was forced to step up, right? Like midwifery, you gotta step up, there's a lot of pain and misery and blood and gore, and beauty and miracles in that situation.
And so when we're looking at our stories, I think it's, it's important to see like, okay, well, so what is our character's misbelief? And what will push them to alter that belief and how can we, how can we then put them in those situations?
[00:12:44] Anne-Marie Strohman: And I think it's really interesting that in this case, for this internal journey about this particular misbelief kind of learns she doesn't need to change that much. Right? Like change more
than She already
has, right? She grows through the course of the story, she becomes more loving.
[00:13:03] Erin Nuttall: absolutely,
[00:13:03] Anne-Marie Strohman: Absolutely. But
she doesn't need to reach that peak of Legalistic perfection that she thought she needed to, right?
So it's a Case in which the misbelief is about two things and it solves it to this happy middle where Rebecca
is honoring God by her love of people, and she's not holding herself to this ridiculous standard that's completely unrealistic,
and
not really the point of honoring God. Right?
[00:13:32] Erin Nuttall: It's not really, you know, what he wanted? He wanted her to love him and love the world. Which is what she learned to do. , it is mind blowing how Martine takes this little thing and weaves it so well with the interesting and exciting plot points that make up this, this story.
So. This is a mini episode. So we're done. And except for our one beautiful sentence, and I'm a little mad that you get to pick because there's so many to choose from that you're taking one of my options, but it's okay. I'll let you do it. I wanna, I wanna know what you, what you pick.
[00:14:13] Anne-Marie Strohman: Well, I picked a sentence from a chapter where there's a lot of action. They're doing something, they're planting potatoes as a family, and this is the sentence still they planted and the eyes of the seed potatoes in the burlap bags begin to look at her with alien pity dropped blind into the earth. And if you can personify a potato in your story, I'm in awe.
[00:14:42] Erin Nuttall: As you should be. That's it for today. If you are enjoying this podcast, you can find more content like this@kidlitcraft.com. You can find us on social media at Kid Lit Craft, and you can support this podcast on Patreon. We'll be sending out Kid Lit Craft stickers to the first 20 subscribers, and we've got T-shirts.
. They're very cute and I will vouch for their softness. You can find those at Cotton Bureau.
download the
[00:15:09] Anne-Marie Strohman: download the
episodes like rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and let your writer friends know about this podcast. We can't wait to nerd out with you.[00:15:18] Erin Nuttall: Thanks for joining us. See you next time.