[Perry] Effective Breaks from Routine

Routine is an interesting thing.

It has a strength and gravity that you almost never realize…until you take a sudden break from the routine and the impact of that break makes you realize just how much the routine had been influencing you.

I see your eyes glazing over already so let’s showcase some more concrete examples.

Let’s say that you buy a cup of coffee, every morning without fail. You drink down this tall, dark cuppa joe within an hour of waking up.

Rain or shine, weekday or weekend, you always start your day with a large cup of coffee.

Then? One day? You don’t get to has that coffee. You go COFFEE-LESS.

Some of you are sitting there going “so what?”

But? I can hear Tami’s GASP of shock and OUTRAGE from all the way up here in Canadia.

See, a routine has…a gravity.

You get sucked into it. You just go along with it and you stop thinking about it after a while because it’s something that happens all the time.

That is…you go along with it until you BREAK the routine.

And once a routine has been broken? That’s when you realize just how ingrained that routine had become. You realize how much a routine means to you by the impact that’s gained by breaking it.

Literary Applications

There are ways that you can use this in your writing and creative endeavors.

See, I’ve been watching a show called Castle recently.

In it, the main characters, Richard Castle and Kate Beckett solve crimes together.

The routine?

They almost always call each other by their last names.

I’m not entirely sure where or why that began, maybe it was in the way they were introduced.

But wherever they go, whatever they’re doing, he always calls her Beckett (as does most of the cast), and she always calls him Castle.

This built up and settled in my bones.

He was Castle. She was Beckett.

Oh, occasionally, to some other characters (Castle’s mother, Kate’s boyfriend), they were referred to by their first names. But as most of the show revolved around the interactions between Castle and Beckett, that’s how I identified the characters in my head, as Castle and Beckett.

This is the routine. This is how it always is and soon, you stop thinking about it.

…Until they BREAK the routine.

In one of the episodes, well into the third season, Castle and Beckett are caught in a life-threatening situation together. Not immediate danger, but they’re slowly dying sort of thing.

There’s a slow, quiet conversation. There’s a lot of emotion behind the words. Some heartfelt feelings coming through…and he calls her by her first name.

I was FLOORED.

There was a lot of weight behind the use of her name. It’s just a name…and it’s been used by many other characters, but almost NEVER by him.

And then he does.

And the breaking of the routine, the use of her first name served as a magnifying glass to all of the things he was trying to tell her.

It had all of the impact of a lightning bolt, heightened by the way the episode ends on a cliffhanger.

And more routine breaking? The next episode starts with the title screen of the show…but this time? The title of the show is in white letters instead of the customary red. And where there’s normally a little musical sting with the title, it’s absent. Nothing but silence.

STRIKING!

IMPACT!

All from breaking a long-standing routine, just a tiny bit, at a critical moment.

Takeaway

Think of any routine that you build up in your works like a dam. It blocks up the water behind it.

You don’t always have to break that routine. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, you really want to keep that dam in place.

But now and then? When you really need to do it, you could take that dam down, break the routine, and have all of that pent up emotional water lend their weight to a scene.

You need to be careful, ever so careful, with this decision.

Too many of these moments and you rob ALL of them of their impact.

No, you need to save them up. Hoard them like a dragon with its gold and let it loose only, ONLY when the situation is dire. When you want your audience to bleed with your characters instead of simply crying for them.

Pick just the right moment and the right routine to break? And you can bring all of that emotion crashing down on your reader’s head like Maxwell’s silver hammer.

And that? Can be a lovely thing indeed.

 

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