New blog entry: The Core Wound Must Be Healed Before the Dénouement

[Lara Sterling]

Yesterday, I was consulting on a script for a short, which had a great
character arc. The main character gets over her flaw, which was
established in the beginning of the script. Still, there was something
that was missing. Yes, there was a good second-act journey, which
corresponded with the main character's flaw, which had pushed the main
character to confront her issues. However, by the time we got to the
end of the script, and the resolution was reached -- or the
dénouement, which it’s called by the French -- there was still
something that didn’t sit right with me. Somehow, it seemed like the
main character had resolved her issues too easily. She had worked,
yes, been confronted with her issues. But there wasn’t that one last
big blowout that had caused her to stand up to what she had really
been dealing with, that which had been holding her back all along.

This particular script was very much a family drama, along the lines
of the 1981 film, Ordinary People. The main character was having
issues with her job, her relationships in general, as well as with her
family, which was namely epitomized by her dealings with her sister.
Basically, it became apparent that the main character’s core wound was
the fact that her mother had committed suicide when she was a child
and that her family had alienated themselves emotionally from her
because they thought she was somehow responsible. The main character
had basically given Mom the drugs to use to take her life with, but
when this had happened, the main character had been a child. How would
she have known that, when her mother told her she didn’t feel well and
that she needed some pills to feel better, that she was going to
ultimately take her own life?

My take on this was not that the main character was only grappling
with the fact that the rest of the family thought that she was at
fault for her mother’s suicide—but that she too thought that she was
at fault. Guilt was her main core wound, the thing that she had been
carrying around inside of her all these years, and which was impeding
her from having a normal, happy life.

Core wound is a term I learned while I was at Writers Boot Camp. I
can’t remember how it was defined there exactly, but if I define it
for you right now, the main character’s core wound is the pain the
main character is suffering from, which is specifically causing her to
act out. The main character flaw -- or misbehavior, as Writers Boot
Camp likes to call it -- is the action/s the main character takes to
exhibit this wound. You need your main character to have a proactive
flaw, because otherwise you don't have any action. You can’t base a
movie around the fact that your mother told you she didn’t love you at
five years old, but you can base it around the action that, as soon as
you reached adulthood, because of that formative experience, you have
decided to act out by never committing in any relationship. The same
goes for having witnessed your father beating your mother at a young
age; now your movie is how you are vengeful toward men as a result.
The character flaw of being fearful needs to have been caused by
something specific that happened in that main character’s life; but
your story is about the journey of them then overcoming that flaw.
However, at some point, during the course of your story, your main
character must also address the source of their misbehavior, which is
encapsulated in the darkest hurt they have inside of them, e.g., their
core wound

The main character's core wound should often be healed right before
the final confrontation. Or perhaps it is healed during that
confrontation, but the main character cannot triumph over the opponent
until it is healed. The core wound is the last one thing that is
holding the main character back from being her true self, from
shedding off the mistakes of the past, and thus experiencing the
resolution of the film, the dénouement. Therefore, it is important to
have this component or your story, or your story's resolution will
come off as trite.