Make Your ‘Best Bad Choice’
Chapter 3 —The Passage
We Swallow Light is a book of poetry arranged in a way that is different from the others. Most poetry collections are sorted by topic or theme.
This book of poetry is arranged like a fictional novel.
Tree Langdon created chapters that follow a story thread, similar to memoirs. Her chapter titles are:
The Binding
Surrender
The Passage
The Rituals
Choosing Love
As a student of the Story Grid, Langdon discovered the 5 commandments of storytelling and has applied them to her new book.
The third chapter is The Passage, which reveals a Crisis that forces the protagonist to make a choice in the story. The Crisis forces the protagonist to reveal their true character.
The protagonist must choose between two mutually exclusive options — two bad ones. Each choice has meaningful stakes attached, so it’s not easy for them to go forward. Once the choice is made, they can’t go back.
This is sometimes referred to as the: best bad choice.
Here’s a quote from one of the poems:
Forgive
“ I recalled the wrongs and sliced open half-healed wounds. I swam deeply in the seething pool and swallowed daily doses of reminders and remembering choking on the bitterness. My inoculation, a ward against hope, on guard against love. It shut me down. Lock.”
