u/orangedwarf98

After numerous rounds of advice, I'm learning that one of the problems with fridging is that the woman's (specifically love interest's) death CANNOT be SOLELY to motivate the MMC. Also, if the wife/gf's death can be replaced with a dog, then rewrite; then, if she were to survive and it doesn't fundamentally change the story, then rewrite.

I'm running into these problems: in a story specifically about grief---which I feel is fair to write about---the woman therefore cannot survive, otherwise it is not a story about grief anymore, and in the same vein fundamentally has to be a motivation for the MMC.

Now, this is what I've ensured for my own dead wife character: she actively tries to fight her own death and has goals if she were to survive that are cut short due to the fact that she does not (making it a tragedy); the MMC also does not try to "save" her in any way that she does not approve of, therefore giving utmost agency; the community is affected by her loss, not in a plot-driven way, but in a wide-spread mournfulness that does affect people's individual lives that is shown on-page; her presence, while not physical, permeates the remainder of the story and she is not left on the page that she died on.

My question then becomes: despite all of these precautions, is she still rendered "fridged" because her death serves as the main plot motivation for MMC? Because it is a wife and not a husband, father, brother, does this make her automatically fridged? - (For the sake of word count, I cannot describe every detail why it matters that she is the wife in this instance, but let us assume that the context is there for the sake of discussion)

So a common thread of questions I’ve gotten related to a query letter I previously posted for critique is mainly about fridging in my story. I since deleted the query after realizing the story had issues and it was not ready for a letter at all.

The basis of the story goes like this (minus a lot of fantasy worldbuilding elements for brevity sake): MC and his wife are living happily until she is struck by this world’s version of cancer. MC tries his absolute hardest to cure her, which includes working a lot to save up money for magical cure that Villain has. Villain is charging a ton of money per little bit of magical cure (mimics chemo in that sense, where you need consistent treatment) and MC is not able to raise the money and so wife ultimately passes.

Based on that alone, it is absolutely understandable where the concern of fridging comes from. Some things I’ve tried to implement since before even the first draft to combat this includes: MC wanting to go force Villain to come and cure her, but his wife makes the deliberate choice to keep trying to raise money (giving her agency over her death), making it so when she passes the entire community mourns her and gives her a ceremonial burial, and the entire story itself revolves around her death and the MC’s grief in her passing and she shows back up in intangible ways consistently throughout the rest of the story.

I don’t know how (in a query or otherwise) to convey that fridging is my biggest concern and also is not my intentions at all. I don’t know how to say “main character’s wife dies in the beginning” without it being written off as misogynistic.

Any advice is appreciated

Currently I am on the third draft of an 185k word document and pretty soon it will be time to cut once I get the overall details more into focus (hopefully below 120k). I've come up with a short list of things I will try to do to cut words down but I really want all the tricks that one might not think to address. I've also already come across this thread, but I'd love any suggestions at all.

So far I'm planning to:

Get rid of filler words/qualifiers

Axe scenes that don't need to be there, same goes for conversations

Look for redundancies, whether that be information already given or emotional points already touched on

Chopping lengthy sentences in half

Before people jump down my throat about not teaching him to read, he came to us at 8 through foster care and is now in the process of adoption. He had a really rough life with moving from unfit family member to unfit family member and none of them were attentive and spent the time to read with him. The result is that he struggles to get through even a chapter of Magic Treehouse!!

He’s improved a TON since working with him quite a bit on it and instead of taking an hour to read 1 page of Magic Treehouse he can do a chapter in about 10 minutes.

The problem is that he absolutely refuses to do it more often than not. Even if he does agree, it’s filled with squirming and distractions and even laughing hysterically to avoid reading. We’ve tried challenging him more and gave him the Wings of Fire book to read and it’s the same deal. His problems areas is that he guesses on words instead of actually reading them and seeing letters that aren’t there (will say “through” instead of “though”). He gets the long words because he can memorize them but still struggles with things like “was”. He used to straight up walk out of the classroom at school if reading got too hard and refused to schoolwork. That rarely happens now but it does happen.

We really don’t know what else to do. He fights it no matter how much we encourage him and we even tell him that we know he doesn’t want to because its hard but just doesn’t like the act of reading. We’re nervous because reading is EVERYWHERE and if he doesn’t know it at least foundationally then everything from now on is going to be so hard and he’ll fall further and further behind. Any advice is appreciated if anyone has also had some difficult things

Also disclaimer: he has had testing through DCF and does not seem to have a learning disability or dyslexia. He does have an IEP at school that gives him built in breaks and has a reading teacher he does semi-well in. We’re just worried he isn’t keeping up nearly as much as he should. Nearly 5th grade and struggling with Wings of Fire makes me nervous

ETA: Thanks so far to everyone who has already been helpful! I’m gonna take the advice and try audiobooks or reading at bedtime as an option instead of going right to bed. I need to keep up with reading to him more and letting him control what he reads. I also like the idea of me reading a little bit and then he does a paragraph or something

Edit 2: After reading some of the things here we were able to get him excited to do audiobooks for an hour in his room before bed. He can also do an hour of regular reading but he’s more into the audiobook idea. Also we will still read to him! But we’re gonna use this as a start