You know, you should let me tell you some stories! I bet my life would make a great basis for a book.
I mention this for two reasons. First is to ask anyone who wasn't an undercover operative for the ATF, or an intelligence asset going on dangerous missions, to please stop asking writers to grant you a touch of immortality. But second, and more germaine to this week's topic, is that stories we tell are supposed to be dramatic, tense, and exciting in order to keep our audience hooked. While you need to have internal consistency in your story, you also don't want 200 pages of someone going to work, coming home, doomscrolling on their phone, and then going back to work again.
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| Unless your commute is off-roading away from gunships, that's not what we're here for. |
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Are You Not Entertained?!
A while back, in my blog "Why Don't They Call The Cops?" A Question You Always Need To Answer, I provided a short, simple explanation from Alfred Hitchcock on this matter. In the immortal director's words, "It's boring."
We can apply this same logic to so many of our tropes and criticisms of fiction out there that may seem trite, played out, or tiresome. For example, why do we leave James Bond in the clutches of some intricate death trap instead of just shooting him in the head and being done with it? Well, for one thing, we'd lose our protagonist, but it's also boring. Why don't Romeo and Juliet arrange a talk with their families to settle the ongoing dispute so they can be together without pressure and strife? First of all, they're stupid teenagers (which is kind of the whole point of the story), but also because that would be boring. Why doesn't Holmes explain the entire mystery as soon as he deduces the relevant details from the crime scene? Firstly, because all his stories would be three pages long, and secondly because that would be boring!
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| You may be seeing a pattern, here. |
The key with your story is to find that intersection between something that is exciting, but which doesn't challenge the internal consistency of your story (something which is, and I hate to use this word, believable). As an example, take a plot where the protagonist needs to come up with a large, fixed amount of money in a short period of time. Maybe they have to pay for an operation, or they're going to lose their house, or there are a bunch of leg breakers who are going to smash up their knees over a mob loan... whatever it is, there's a definite obstacle that needs to be overcome.
Now, it is believable that this person would contact not-for-profit organizations that help in this specific area to cover some of the cost? That they would host a GoFundMe, or some other kind of fundraiser? Maybe that they'd cash in some life insurance early, get a loan from a bank, or sell off other things of value to raise that money? They might even take that job offer for a position they hate just to get the cash to keep living? Sure, that's more believable. But consider how much more dramatic it would be for the character to enter a sports tournament where they're the underdog, to get involved in an underground poker game, to plot to kill a rich family member who has left a large estate to them in their will, or to pull a bank job with their old crew.
Your job, as the author, is to make that exciting answer (whichever one it is that you choose) seem believable to your audience.
For example, perhaps your protagonist did reach out to local charities, or try to run a fundraiser to handle this issue. Maybe they have reached out to friends and family, or to their job, but they can't get the help they need from the network they have access to. So with the "normal" options exhausted, they have to do something more dramatic to get the results they need, and that is where our story takes place. It's still exciting and dramatic, filled with all the complications that come with a high-stakes answer to a high-stakes problem, and we can read on knowing that those more pedestrian solutions have been explained away, allowing us to really enjoy this version of the story.
It's also important to remember that something doesn't have to be high-stakes to be dramatic. The solution to a simple teenage relationship problem can often be dramatic, whether we're talking about Twilight or we're going back to Shakespeare, even if it isn't high stakes in and of itself. Stories about a personal vendetta between two people may not be high stakes, but if we're invested that is all that matters. And part of what gets people invested is that the story is how exciting it is! Whether it's a meet-cute at a cafe, a man getting involved in the underground cage fighting circuit, or just some guy getting kidnapped by the cartel due to a case of mistaken identity, that drama gets people to keep turning the pages.
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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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