No, this isn’t a post about red herrings, the sort of devious wrong turns with which mystery writers like to ensnare their readers. Rather, it’s in response to a comment on the Murderati blog from my friend Pari Noskin Taichert, about throwing away a whole bunch of great prose because she realized her book started in the wrong place.
I’ve read a great many stories, especially in the critique groups I’ve belonged to, where it was clear that the writer had taken a great idea, run it off into the ditch, and left it there because she was afraid to backtrack and start over. There the stories that you read, finish, and then wonder “why didn’t the writer use Jane as the narrator instead of Igor?” or “why did the romance with Aaron spring up out of nowhere in the middle of the story?” or “why did Artie, who didn’t show up until page 273 of the book, turn out to be the killer, when George clearly had a more logical motive?”
I think that in many cases, the answer is that the author invested too much writing into the story before realizing that George would have made a better killer, that Jane really did have a more compelling voice, or that Aaron should have appeared sooner in the narrative. This is a problem especially common among writers who don’t outline — and I should qualify my biases by saying I ususally don’t outline, either, though I try to have a pretty solid idea of the major flow of my plot before I begin writing — but it’s not exclusively the fate of the non-outliners. Sometimes it’s easier to see these false starts in an outline, but sometimes characters have a way of surprising you and doing things you wouldn’t have expected, back before you understood them so well.
But outline or don’t, the trouble comes when you realize you’ve made a mistake. To be fair, in some cases, authors don’t realize they’ve gone down a blind alley, and there’s not a lot that can be done about that. Hopefully, those folks have good critiquing partners and editors and the like, people who might tumble to things they’ve overlooked. But that’s another topic for another day. Today’s question is, what do you do when you realize you’ve gotten sucked into the wormhole, and getting out means blowing up a day’s (or month’s) worth of work?
This is where a certain attitude of detachment works in your favor. Remind yourself that your words aren’t your children. Remind yourself that electrons and ink molecules don’t have feelings, and your paper won’t feel wounded if you throw it in the recycle bin. Your thumb drive won’t ever go on Oprah to talk about how traumatized it felt when you re-formatted it. Erasers won’t leap screaming from your hands, shouting, “No! Don’t make us!”
You are a writer. The words have come before, and they’ll come again. And part of this job (hey, you did choose this crazy profession, right?) is throwing away the words that aren’t working, starting over when you have to, and clawing your way out of the blind alleys. Sure, it’s hard to see three days work tossed in the trash. But if your job is to produce the very best story you can, sometimes that goes with the territory.
“But, I wasted all that time!” I hear you cry. No, you didn’t. Going down a wrong turn might have been, in fact, the necessary step to discovering the truth about how your story needed to unfold. A map doesn’t help you figure out how to reach your destination until you know where you are on it. Sometimes you can’t see the right road until you look at things from the vantage point of the wrong one. When Thomas Edison was asked if he felt all the experiments which led up to his invention of the incandescent light were wasted, he reportedly answered, “Not at all. Now, I definitely know more than a thousand ways how NOT to make a light bulb.”
So don’t mourn the time spent in those wrong turns. Dust yourself off and, armed with the knowledge that you now know another way not to make a light bulb, go forward and reshape your story. Use the new-found direction you’ve won, and take your writing in the direction it needs to go.
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Whether you’re writing mysteries, thrillers or even romances, a key part of any story is tension. Will the pretty young housewife evade the crazed killer hiding in her bathroom closet? Will the cop ferret out the mad poisoner, or will he strike again? Will the beautiful maiden find her Prince Charming and ride away into the sunset? If your story doesn’t have any tension, any element of unanswered question, your readers won’t have any reason to care about how it ends. And if they don’t care, they won’t keep reading.
There are myriad ways to create and build tension, but one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal is also one of the simplest: raise the stakes.
Thriller writers are especially adept at wielding this tool. Take a look at a good thriller, and you’ll see a steady progression: things get bad, then they get worse. Triumphs are followed by defeats and those by more defeats. The ultimate victory, when it comes, is always hard-won - which is part of what makes it satisfying. It’s hard to savor a victory that’s won too easily, or one that comes without challenge.
Let’s look at an example. Here’s the germ of a story, a beginning onto which we can build:
A woman is cashing a check at the bank when robbers storm into the place, guns drawn. In the ensuing confrontation, a guard is shot and killed and the woman is taken hostage. As stories go, this isn’t a bad place to start. We already have a few points of tension: will the robbers be captured? Will the hostages escape alive?
But let’s look at some places we could introduce yet more tension into this framework:
- What if the robbers are themselves escaped prison inmates, who stole their guns from a nearby farmhouse? What if the leader of the gang is a convicted murderer who’s facing a needle if he goes back to prison? He’s dead anyway, so he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being ruthless and cold-blooded.
- What if one of the hostages is a fugitive on the run from justice? Or what if the mousy-looking guy in the corner just happens to be the man whose testimony put one of them away in the first place? Hey, stranger things have happened.
- What if our female hostage is a single mom with a small child at home? That’s not bad, but it’s a tad clicheed, so let’s raise the stakes a bit more. What if her son is seriously ill? Let’s say he’s got a chronic and ultimately fatal lung disease, and he needs a breathing treatment every eight hours. He’s at home sleeping right now, because mom was only counting on being gone for a few minutes, but pretty soon he’s going to wake up and need that treatment. And he can’t administer it himself.
Do you see how you can turn a relatively ordinary story into something unusual by amping up the tension? In the novel A Maiden’s Grave, Jeffrey Deaver did something similar to amp the tension up right from the beginning: He made the hostages a group of students and teachers from a Deaf school. The tension ramped up from there, of course, but in that one decision he made the power differential between good guys and bad guys a little sharper, he made us care just a little bit more about the hostages and what happened to them, and he made his take start with a bit more tension out of the gate.
If you’re a writer, what have you done in your stories to create tension? What are your favorite ways to raise the stakes? And if you’re a reader, how do your favorite writers keep your pulse racing?
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