Sometimes the Magic Works (7 page)

 

The reader wants to see something happen
between pages one and four hundred, and nothing
happens if the characters don't change.

 

M
AUD
M
ANX
,
P
ART
O
NE

OKAY, IT'S TIME for some fun.

Not that we haven't been having plenty up until now, of course. But all this talk about craft can be pretty dry in the absence of examples that remind us that writing should always be, first and foremost, enjoyable.

I have some rules about writing that I follow rather rigorously, and this seems a good place to talk about them. They don't mean much outside of their practical application, so I thought I would give you a look at the way I might use them in my writing. But I don't want to tackle this task with anything serious and certainly not with one of my own books (Do you think I'm nuts?) so I have invented a story that I hope will illustrate the importance of my rules without putting you to sleep.

Let's pretend that I have decided to write a thriller. I've finished my dream time and come up with a fairly typical sort of tale. It involves a retired government operative, once the best in the business, who has been hunted down by her lifelong nemesis and now faces one final confrontation before she goes to that big CIA complex in the sky. This will be a classic kind of story, the hero alone against impossible odds, her courage and strength of character tested as she discovers that you can never really escape your past.

My lead character is Maud Manx, a real road warrior. At eighty years of age, she has slowed down a bit. She has only one arm, loves cats, hates birds, and once worked as a bookseller for a small independent bookstore specializing in books on plants and animals. She was with the CIA for thirty years, but has been retired for the past fifteen in the little town of Octogenarian, Montana, where she lives up in the mountains in a small cabin with her aging toms, Kibbles and Bits.

Her enemy is a ruthless scientist named Feral Finch. Finch was a CIA operative, as well, but he turned rogue and eventually formed his own network of troublemakers who have plagued the CIA ever since. Maud and Finch were once partners, but now are bitter enemies. Finch, in an experiment gone horribly wrong, turned himself from a man into a large bird and is unable to regain his human form. Embittered and vengeful, he blames the government (well, who doesn't?) for his problems. He also blames Maud. In an earlier confrontation, Finch, in his bird form, took off Maud's arm at the shoulder.

They haven't done battle in twenty years, but now Finch has come in search of Maud with the intent of doing her in. Alone and seemingly unprotected, her association with the CIA long since ended, her strength depleted with age, and her skills dissipated by the passing of time, Maud must face her enemy alone.

Supporting characters include a small group of people that our mountain-dwelling retiree has come to know in the natural course of things. We have Alfred Stamp, the postman, who is known for his uncertain temper and erratic behavior; little Johnny Gazette, the paperboy, who sometimes brings Maud canned beets from his mother; and Martha Handy, the strange old lady who lives deep in the woods behind Maud and makes all her own clothes out of tree bark. I am also thinking about a local law enforcement presence, but haven't decided about that yet.

The title of my imaginary tome is
Cat Chaser
.

Pretty good so far, right? A catchy title, the promise of lots of excitement, a hero and villain who might prove interesting, and some potentially quirky supporting characters. Sure, it's silly and the only ones who could do it justice would be Dave Barry or Carl Hiaasen, but it will serve our purposes well enough.

So with our Maud Manx thriller as a working model, let's look at a few of those rules I mentioned earlier.

The first is a familiar one:
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW
.

What the heck does that mean, anyway? Does it mean I can't write about anything that hasn't happened to me? If it doesn't involve the Midwest or lawyers or writers or bookselling, am I out of my depth? I've had lots of cats and dogs, so I'm on solid ground there, but I've never had much use for birds. I don't know anyone who has lost an arm. I've never worked for the CIA, though some of my editor's most successful authors are former spooks. So how am I supposed to follow this rule, given my limited life experience?

The answer, of course, is that this rule is not to be interpreted literally. I have heard E. L. Doctorow say that any writer of fiction should be able to write about any period in history after reading only a single sentence written from that time. He was telling his audience that writers are blessed with active imaginations for a reason. I need only enough familiarity with my subject matter to give the reader the
feeling
that I have some idea of what I am talking about. I don't need to know all about the CIA to write this story. I'm not writing about the CIA. By the same token, I don't need to have lost an arm to write about it. I just need to give my readers a sense of what that would be like, to make it feel real for them.

You can achieve most of what you need through a little bit of research, a smidgen of intuition, and a judicious use of imagination. What you want to avoid—what the rule is really all about—is trying to write a story in which the central elements rely on extensive life knowledge that you don't have. So, for example, you don't want to tackle a story in which the lead character is a doctor trying to cure cancer and where a consideration of various current advances in medicine is central to the plot if you don't know anything about doctors or cancer or medicine and don't want to research all three extensively. You want to write about aspects of the human condition that you are comfortable exploring or inhabiting over the course of your book.

If I want to make Maud and Feral former CIA operatives, I had better have a talk with my editor about what this is like and do some reading by some of those former spooks. It wouldn't hurt for me to do a little reading about people with disabilities, either.

This brings us to rule number two:
YOUR CHARACTERS MUST BEHAVE IN A BELIEVABLE FASHION
.

This rule is an important addendum to the first. If you don't know what you are writing about to begin with, it becomes difficult for you to know how to describe your characters. How do CIA operatives behave? How do they think? What makes them different from, say, policemen? Or are they? Even if you don't have life experience in this field, you have to find out, if you are going to make your protagonist believable.

It is important to understand that this doesn't mean that Maud can't do some things that are entirely out of character with what you discover to be true about CIA operatives or about her personally. But it does mean that what she does at any given point has to feel right in the context of the storytelling. She might well do something totally out of character, like offer help to a bird she finds lying injured by the side of the road, even though she hates birds. But I have to give the reader a reason to believe that she might behave in this way under the circumstances.

The meshing of your characters and your plot should feel seamless to the reader. It isn't inappropriate to let the reader wonder about how a character behaves at any given point, if somewhere down the road an explanation is offered or implied that brings everything back into line. What doesn't work is when a character acts in an offhanded, arbitrary way and no reason is ever given for this. Or worse, if a character behaves in a fashion that suggests the writer is attempting to solve a troublesome plot device with an easy out: the dreaded deus ex machina. Irrational or inconsistent behavior merely detracts from the effort at creating a wholly realized, believable character.

So in our development of Maud and Finch, we need to see them interact and react in ways that make sense to us in terms of what we know to be true about the larger world and the human condition.

The third rule is an easy one:
A PROTAGONIST MUST BE CHALLENGED BY A CONFLICT THAT REQUIRES RESOLUTION
.

That's easy enough here, where Maud is facing a life-threatening confrontation with an old enemy. The entire book centers on their efforts to outsmart each other, and we know going in that one of them, or maybe even both, will fail. Conflict is necessary in every book because that's what generates concern for and interest in our characters. But we especially need it in this story because without it, we don't have much of a thriller.

Fair enough. We've got our conflict. But in order to lend some depth to this story, maybe we want to expand Maud's problems beyond her impending confrontation with her nemesis. Maybe Maud has lost the steely determination that once served her so well as a CIA operative. Maybe her life is different enough that, like the sheriff in
High Noon
, she doesn't want to have to face another showdown. So now we have an opportunity to watch her wrestle with her fears and doubts, even as she awaits the inevitable appearance of Feral Finch. Maybe she is afraid for her cats or one of her friends or neighbors and must carry the burden of their safety on her aging shoulders, as well. Maybe she has just discovered she is going blind, and her sight comes and goes at inappropriate moments, leaving her particularly vulnerable to an attack. The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.

Of course, you can overdo this. Too many threats make the story unbelievable. Too much conflict renders it unrealistic. As with all things, you have to find a balance that works.

The fourth rule ties right into the first three:
MOVEMENT EQUALS GROWTH; GROWTH EQUALS CHANGE; WITHOUT CHANGE, NOTHING HAPPENS
.

Uh-oh. I can read the confusion on your faces from here. The last part of this equation is self-explanatory. I think we all agree that changes in the lives of characters are necessary for the reader to feel that the journey traveled from beginning to end in a book has been worthwhile. But what about the rest of it? What the heck does all that mean?

Let's start with the word
movement
and see if the mystery won't come clear. When I use the word here, I am speaking of the sort of movement that takes place in the lives of characters during the course of a book. That movement can take many different forms. In some books, the movement is of a purely physical nature. The characters are on a quest that requires them to travel a great distance, or they are situated in a strange place that requires them to move around to understand what is happening. In other books, no one goes much of anywhere, and the movement is all emotional or even psychological. The characters are discovering truths about themselves or others that they hadn't recognized before. They are coming to terms with their lives through events and circumstances or through their interaction with other characters. Maybe they never even leave their houses, but they are moving about inside their own heads, nevertheless.

What matters is that in each case, whether the movement is physical or emotional or psychological, the result is that some form of growth takes place with the characters involved. Again, it might be physical—a coming of age that results in a transition from child to adult, a literal growing up. It might also be a coming of age that takes place emotionally or psychologically, one that involves maturity of thought, and takes place inside the person involved. Or it might be a kind of recognition of truths that becomes life-transforming.

But without that movement to trigger that growth and that growth to cause that change, we don't have a very compelling story. The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and as the rule points out, nothing happens if the characters don't change. I would suggest that this is the single biggest problem with series in all categories of fiction writing. From one book to the next, the characters don't ever change, don't ever grow, and don't ever surprise. They turn static, and when that happens you can be pretty sure the writer has lost interest in what he or she is doing.

So in
Cat Chaser
, even if we don't see this as more than a single book, Maud needs to evolve in some measurable way. She needs to do more than sit around fretting about the coming of Feral. Engaging in a successful confrontation that frees her from her worries isn't enough. She has to do more. She has to come to terms with who and what she is, what it means to her to have to fight that last battle, and how she is likely to go on with things once it is over. The reader wants some enlightenment on these issues, some sense of the humanity of the character, and if the author doesn't provide it, the story loses a great deal of its impact.

Part of the way in which we writers achieve all this is through the relationship we create between our protagonist and antagonist. Thus, our fifth rule:
THE STRENGTH OF THE PROTAGONIST IS MEASURED BY THE THREAT OF THE ANTAGONIST
.

The stronger the threat posed by the antagonist, the greater the demands placed on the protagonist, to put it another way. If we are to be compelled by what happens to our main character over the course of the story, we must see him or her challenged in an appropriately demonstrable way. We don't want to read some four hundred pages only to discover the obstacles faced were never really much of anything after all. This doesn't mean we have to see a protagonist placed in a life-and-death situation every time out in order not to be disappointed. It means that given the nature of the story, the conflict facing the protagonist must be real and challenging.

Don't forget that the antagonist in a story isn't always a person. It might be an animal or a monster. It might be an appliance or a vehicle; Stephen King has written more than a few of those. It might be the weather or a mountain or an inhospitable climate. It might be an impending cataclysmic event, like a nuclear explosive on the verge of detonation. It might be a disfiguring injury or a life-threatening disease. But in each instance, the size of the threat—its immediacy, perversity, potential consequences, and so on—will provide a way to measure the courage, resolve, and strength of character of our protagonist.