I'm Worried. Are You Worried?
Colm Tóibín, Five Bridges, and how to harness your characters' preoccupations.
If you’re new here, read this quick primer on the Story Energies, a new way to talk about storytelling.
Before I begin, I want to take a moment to mention/plug my upcoming nonfiction class on Writers.com, Roads to Revelation: Write 6 Essays in 6 Weeks:
In each week of this course, you will explore a new route down which you can generate fresh material. You’ll discuss readings by experts, receive advice and encouragement from your instructor, complete a tailored writing exercise, and write a first draft of a brand-new thousand-word essay.
These roads to revelation will take you into unexplored terrain, but you’ll receive lots of guidance on how to discover new and interesting things about yourself and the world around you. You’ll collect a truckload of tips and tools to help you reflect on your experiences and preoccupations, observe the world around you, recollect an event from your past, research a topic that fascinates you, delve into your confusion over a question you’re grappling with, and find ways to persuade others of one of your convictions.
The course will take place asynchronously on WetInk.com, so you can do all the reading and writing on your own schedule. It begins next Wednesday, Apr 16. Click here for more info.
Over at GrubStreet, I have two classes scheduled for the summer—Intro to Fiction, a six-week course on how to get started writing short stories (Jun 23 – Jul 28, 10:30am–1:30pm Eastern) and Advanced Revision Strategies: Fiction, an eight-week intensive course on how to take your stories from ‘could be published’ to ‘must be published’ (Jun 18 – Aug 6, 2025, 6:00pm–9:00pm). Sign up/apply now!
Last week in my current class at GrubStreet, the Short Story Workshop, we were talking about plot and structure. I swapped my countryman Colm Tóibín’s recent New Yorker story Five Bridges into the syllabus, so we could look at how we can keep our readers riveted without packing our pages with action. And it got me thinking about worries…
Worries are stories. Trivial or profound, based-on-true-events or invented-by-overactive-imaginations, most of us have several on the go at any given moment.
They can, sometimes, feel like a waste of time and energy. But worrying is also one of the ways we make sense of our lives. And for us storytellers, our characters’ preoccupations can be an ample source of Story Energy, waiting to be harnessed…
In Colm Tóibín’s short story Five Bridges, our protagonist Paul has a lot to be worried about—he’s been an illegal immigrant in the US for decades, a new President wants to deport him back to Ireland, and his daughter Geraldine is almost twelve.
(Five Bridges was published in the March 10 issue of the New Yorker, and you can hear Tóibín read it (for free) in this episode of their Writer’s Voice podcast. Spoilers below.)
In our terms, we can see Potential Energy in Paul’s immigration status, rolls of cash stuffed in socks, and complicated family situation—Geraldine’s mother Sandra left him when she was still pregnant, and has for years been married to Stan; Paul only began trying to build a relationship with Geraldine when she was four, after he stopped drinking.
The complicated gig economy (odd jobs fixing leaking sinks for cash) and social mores of the expat community (drinks in the Irish bar) add Gravitational Energy to the set-up, even before the cranked-up activity of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Another writer might have put all this Potential to work by having ICE agents break down Paul’s apartment door, or arrest him as he’s waiting to pick his daughter up from school. But Tóibín prefers a quieter approach, that lets us really get to know his characters without resorting to gun fights or car chases; without, in fact, all that much happening at all.
When this story begins, Paul has already decided to fly back to Ireland of his own accord. And when it ends, about 8,500 words later, he still hasn’t gone yet. Nothing particularly dramatic has happened, and we’ve seen no new major turning points in his life’s story. And yet, for me at least, this is a compelling piece of fiction, that quickly drew me in, kept me turning its pages, and left me with a lump in my throat.
How, without injecting ‘dramatic’ action into his scenes, does Tóibín pull this off?
Worries.
Often, when we try to figure out how a story works, it becomes a question of how the story looks at things. A narrative’s point-of-view can feel natural and straightforward, but it is always very complex and sophisticated. We’ll return to POV in future posts, but today I want to look at some of the possibilities opened up for this story once we gain access to Paul’s preoccupations.
The story opens on a conversation between Paul and Geraldine. She is already convincing him to grant her ‘one wish’ before his imminent departure: join her, her mother, and Stan on a hike up to a hostel atop Mount Tam. He agrees, and the scene ends. The stage is set, the plan is in motion—so far, so conventional.
Now we enter a sequence where he exchanges texts with Geraldine and Sandra—we move quickly through time, as messages sometimes take a day to arrive, but we also patiently witness Paul carefully composing his replies:
He was tempted to reply “No” and leave it at that. And then he wondered if it might be better not to reply at all, to pretend he hadn’t received her text. But he knew he should resolve this now, reply while both Geraldine and Sandra were on their phones. He wondered if Stan was standing over them.
He read the text over before he sent it. He did not want to appear too friendly.
That text-conversation leads straight into this paragraph:
Sunday was his busy day. Although he called himself a plumber, he had never actually got a license and lacked the finer knowledge of the trade. He could, however, fix a leak; he could replace a washer; he could use a soldering iron; he could deal with most types of valves; and he could put in new taps. He had his own way of unblocking pipes. Anything more complicated he left to others. Since he had stopped drinking, he could set out immediately if there was an emergency. He didn’t need to advertise; people he’d worked for passed on his number to others. He could be depended on to respond to a call from anywhere in the Bay Area.
That first sentence—Sunday was his busy day—is addressed to nobody, but we understand that he’s thinking almost out loud to himself, because he’s worried about the earnings he’s going to miss out on. Tóibín then follows this line of thinking into a summary of Paul’s work. On one level, this is the narration speaking directly to us readers, filling us in on the day-to-day life of this character. But lingering on from the first line, we still have the vague sense that Paul is speaking. Defending himself, maybe, or justifying his decisions, this path he has taken. He has his own thing, he doesn’t overreach, he has stopped drinking, he is reliable, dependable. The kind of man who can in fact be trusted to look after his own daughter.
It’s exposition. But it doesn’t feel like an unmotivated dump of information. For me, at least, one sentence flows into the next along the brooding current of his thoughts. The sequence continues:
He went into his tiny bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He should get a haircut before he went home, or even before he went on a hike. And get his eyebrows tidied up. And he should try to shave more often. Almost no one had been in this apartment since he had split up with Nuala Breathnach, who used to sing on Thursday nights at the Greyhound Track, the bar in Oakland that he frequented. At first, Nuala had actually claimed to like this cramped, cluttered space with windows that rattled when buses and trucks went by.
In the end, she told him, and then anyone else in the bar who would listen, that the reason she was returning to Mayo was the state of Paul’s apartment—the awful sheets, the flat pillows, the pile of clothes on the old armchair, the smell of stale beer.
“That sort of thing is over,” she said. “There isn’t one fellow at home who’s still living like that.”
We assume we have returned to the story’s present moment, right after he sent that last message, so that he can consider the deficiencies of his appearance. But off we go again, spiralling into his last romance, summed up in her transition from claiming to like the deficiencies of his apartment to her declaration that the state of it was what was sending her back to Ireland. The dialogue yanks us right back into that moment of judgement—he is deficient.
A character gazing at a mirror to pause for reflection happens so often in stories it’s become a cliché—but that didn’t bother me, as I was reading. Again, it felt natural, organic to the story being told. This man, alone in his apartment—where else would he look, when he is worrying about seeing his ex-, and her husband. When he is weighing his decisions—tallying his accounts, as Father Purdon asks men to do in James Joyce’s story Grace—as he comes to the end of this chapter of his life, and tries to look forward to the next one.
The current of his preoccupations flows onwards through the following paragraphs—his apartment to tidy, his cash to leave with Geraldine, no, because Sandra might ask him if he was just using his daughter as a way of keeping his money safe. The fact that he has overstayed his tourist visa for thirty years, and that once he leaves, he won’t be allowed to return, maybe ever. How Geraldine will have to come to Ireland if she wants to see him. How, though he sometimes blamed Sandra for not including him in Geraldine’s life when she was little, he knows that was “his fault and only his fault.” How, if he had got his act together as soon as Sandra got pregnant, she might have married him. How, instead, he blew that relationship—he recalls the last night he went with her for dinner, and the things he did wrong, and how he didn’t see her after that for four years.
Back in the story’s present moment, he looks around his apartment and wonders who would want any of this rubbish. He imagines the landlord better off, once he’s gone, when he can charge someone in tech four times what Paul pays. And then off he goes worrying again, about his parents, about what might have happened if he didn’t stop drinking, about how he might never have connected with Geraldine, and how he could, as an old man, have passed her on the street, and that all carries us eventually into the scene where he meets Sean F. Kirwan.
Kirwan becomes a kind of spiritual mentor for Paul. And, meanwhile, a useful device for the story—a vessel for Paul to pour his worries into, and a wall for him to bounce his ideas off. As the story meanders through the coming years, as he tries to reconnect with Geraldine, as he slowly gains Sandra’s trust, as Sandra marries Stan, as Geraldine grows older.
Until finally this current of his preoccupations carries us forward into the day of this hike, when Geraldine manages, for a brief moment at least, to put his mind at rest.
A lot of Standard Storytelling Advice warns us to be concise, and precise. To show, not tell. To not, for heaven’s sake, spend fifteen pages fretting about going on a walk—just go on the walk! Where, of course, something unexpected should happen—Paul could fall and break his ankle, or punch Stan, or, why not, push Sandra off a cliff?
And it is true that spending time with a character and their thoughts, as they worry about this or that, will impact the pacing of a story.
But in a way, sharing your character’s preoccupations is showing. You’re showing us their worrying, which is an important part of the human experience for many of us.
Letting us into your characters’ minds lets you move quickly through time and space, and land smoothly in the most resonant moments of their backstory. It helps you get information to your reader, in a way that feels natural, and motivated by the events of the story’s ‘present moment’.
In the present moment of this story, as I said, we see no new major turning points, but by the end we learn that he moved as a young man to the US, that he spent a time living happily with his girlfriend, that she got pregnant and left him. We learn that he drank too much, and stopped drinking, thanks in large part to the intervention of Sean F. Kirwan, who runs the bar he drinks at, and who plays a priest-like role in the lives of many single Irish men in the Bay Area. We learn about how he’s managed to eke out a living as a plumber without much training or any formal qualifications. We learn that he gradually managed to gain the trust of his ex-, so that he gets to spend time with Geraldine. And we learn that they have been gradually getting to know each other, Paul and Geraldine, and now he is going to have to leave, probably without any chance of ever returning.
Worries, we could say, are windows to our souls, and when you give us readers access to your characters’ preoccupations, you let us get to know them on a profound level. Their worries help us recognise something in them, and empathise with them, because we too have directions our minds go in when we stare too long in a mirror. And then they help us go on a journey with them, because we have access to their deepest thoughts, and so can appreciate the significance of, say, getting to share a room in a hostel with your twelve-year-old daughter, and watch her quickly, easily, calmly fall asleep.
From a Story Energies point of view, having a character think about their past, and the circumstances of their present, helps us access the Potential and Gravitational Energy that might otherwise lie encased in the story’s subtext.
And a worry is not just a neutral thought—it is thought charged with emotion, or Electrical Energy. This effect is usually quite subtle, but it does help lift the narration, and bring the story to life.
And because their worries help us readers get to know your character more intimately, they encourage us to form a bond with them, and they help us understand the bonds between the characters. Voilà: Magnetic Energy.
So what can we learn from Colm Tóibín and his Five Bridges? What advice can we take forward into our own storytelling?
Here’s an exercise:
Pick a character, and follow these steps:
Make a list of five or ten things they are worried about.
Without stopping to worry about grammar or sense, freewrite their stream of consciousness as they consider each of these worries—
Why this worry exists?
what they did to bring this worry into existence?
What bad things might happen related to this worry?
why they will be to blame for these bad things?
What steps they can take to prevent these bad things from happening?
why they might take credit for this preventing
Take a look at the structure of your story. Ask yourself:
What worries can you put to work in your story to give your reader important information about your characters1, or the Demands placed on them by their situations2?
How can you deepen our connection with your characters by showing us them worrying about their Values, or the things they really care about3?
How can you deepen our understanding of the bonds between your characters by having one character worry about another?4
What turning points in the story can you clarify by showing us a character worry about something that has already happened (a cause), or that might happen later (a consequence)?
How can you deepen the emotional impact of your ending by putting their mind at rest—or by making their worst nightmare come true?
Write your next draft!
What about you?
Have you read (or listened to) Five Bridges? Did you find it compelling? Were you bored? Did you find Paul sympathetic? Or insufferable?
Do you tend to give your readers or audience access to your characters preoccupations? Or do you try to stick close the level of event or action?
Can you think of any other stories where worrying plays a major role? (Hint: there’s lots!)
What are you worried about?
Let me know in the comments!
Cover photograph by Todd Hido for The New Yorker
For more on how to develop your characters by giving them a lack or a longing, read this:
For more on the Demands placed on a character by your story’s setting, read this:
For more on harnessing a character’s Values to develop your story, read this:
For more on the benefits of making your characters different from one another, and on the dramatic potential of showing them what they yet have in common, read this:
