Stepping Razors - Life at the Edge

Serendipity: Charles' post today, combined with Peter Tosh singing Stepping Razor (a childhood favorite!) gave me this topic.

Fiction is about edges. Extreme edges. Nasty and jagged edges or so-sharp-you-never-feel-the-cut-til-you-see-the-blood edges.

If you've got your stakes right, your story happens at the exact moment, the edge, where one thing becomes another.

Sure, I write thrillers. Edges come naturally, since the stakes tend to be truly overwhelming threats. But imagine something a bit more... literary. A marriage in danger.

Betty suspects Joe of cheating. There have been little signs, nothing strong enough to confront Joe on, but tiny things adding up in the back of her head. Day to day, they go about their married life together with this tension between them. Every look, every gesture, Betty tells herself she's crazy to worry, or she tells herself she must be right. Betty is eating herself alive wondering if Joe is faithful.

Tension? Yup. Stakes? Sure. But there's no story here. Not yet. This is all the face of the blade, the flat of the sword. We have yet to reach the edge.

There's nothing happening.

To have a story, you have to push this situation to the breaking point. Betty finds someone else's panties in Joe's pocket. Or a matchbook from a gay bar. An adult movie company sends Joe a check or a strange woman shows up on the doorstep, belly swollen and pregnant.

That's where the story happens. Joe can turn out to be faithful or not. The story can be comedy, tragedy, adventure, whatever. But it doesn't start until you reach the very edge of the situation.

Can't you show any of that blade face? Sure. Exactly as much as you need to make the reader's heart race when she sees the edge. My usual rule of thumb is a chapter, maybe two. This is Life Before. After this, nothing will ever be the same....

Everybody up to speed with that? Okay. Because now I'm diving into the Full Throttle Toolbox of Cheap and Dirty Tricks!

Subtly amplify this sense of edges and stakes with setting.

Put your story in a coastal community, and set your scenes of greatest tension right on the beach, where water meets land.

Or a crossroads. A border town. A bridge. A place poised on the edge of becoming something else (torn down, built up, etc.).

Set a story in the last days of winter, so that it ends with a green and vibrant spring.

Set your story around a wedding, a birth, a festival.

Set important scenes at seminal times of day: sunset, dawn, high noon, midnight.

Combine any of these setting elements to add to the tension inherent (hopefully inherent!) in your stakes. After all, Frank McCourt's train gets in at High Noon, not 11:38AM.

And anything happening is more interesting in a border town before a storm front breaks a long and brutal heat wave, or at a sunset wedding on the beach. And standing in the crossroads at midnight?

Fuggedabouddit....

Yikes

79,000 words

One thing I love about thrillers (and part of why I naturally gravitate to writing them) is that sense of doom, not impending, but hurtling at the protagonist at 100mph (or 180kph, since we're metric here...).

A thriller will have a built-in deadline to disaster, be it large (doomsday device, et al) or small (pay the ransom or we kill your child). The hero must struggle to get on top of a situation in which she's initially out of control and relatively powerless. The later the hero gets the upper hand, and the more her eventual victory looks in doubt, the more exciting the story.

A powerful way to keep the hero off-balance is to take that deadline and shorten it. Drastically. Move that countdown timer from 10 minutes to 10 seconds. Reveal that the kidnappers won't wait for the ransom to kill the kid; they're going to do it tonight.

One thing about my jump-in-and-write style is that in this first pass I'm often as surprised as anyone by the twists and turns in the story.

I should have seen the shortened deadline coming, but I didn't. And I didn't see how the stakes would suddenly ratchet up in so many ways as it shortened.

Sarah was supposed to have two or three days to get on top of her situation. Now she's got one night. She's going to need every resource she has to beat this. Now my heart's beating as a reader, but it's freaking jackhammering as the writer. I can't let her down, but I don't see how I can do it.

I'm going to need every resource *I* have to beat this. :-)

The Mighty McGuffin

46,800 words (storm clouds closer, corpse on slab, where's Igor with that brain?)

I just started reading STAY, by Nicola Griffith. I picked it up because her noir detective is also a six-foot blond female martial artist. And because a couple of short peeks inside the pages showed a style at once lean and muscular and also lyric and poetic. You wouldn't think the two go together, but there it is.

I must be getting pretty secure in my voice, because I didn't worry that the book would throw me off my own track. Good thing, too. These first fifty pages have absolutely *hummed*.

Yesterday's post about stakes got me thinking about McGuffins. That's a word Alfred Hitchcock used to describe the thing all the characters want, the thing they're chasing, whatever it may be. A suitable match for the Dashwoods. Certain pages from Lovecraft's Necronomicon. The truth about the death of Meyer's neice. A better life for the Joads.

Hitchcock felt it didn't really matter what the McGuffin was. The important thing was that the characters' action and reactions to it be human and believable. Probably the ultimate example (at least, before dawn on a Tuesday morning) is the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. What's in it? We don't know, and to a certain extent, don't care. We just need to know that it's worth killing for, worth double-crossing a man like Marcelus Wallace to have, however briefly.

One difference I'd have with Hitchcock is that he always spoke about McGuffins in terms of a bunch of people competing for the same thing. I don't think that needs to be the case, and I'm not sure he really did either. The story drives, and drives hard, as long as one character deeply, deeply cares about the McGuffin. That's all.

I mean, most of the characters in Psycho didn't know or care about Norman's twisted efforts to win his dead mother's love through blood sacrifice. Which is really what's at stake for him, the thing he's chasing. Everyone else falls into his clutches with varying results until he's locked up.

The novel I'm writing right now, I've recently found out that what my two groups of bad guys are fighting over isn't what I'd originally thought at all. Funny thing is, they've been chasing it anyway, with all the morality, mercy and restraint of sharks in bloody water. Now a lot of their odder actions make sense. The shape was there, I just hadn't uncovered it...