Several years ago, someone asked me why I had started writing crime fiction. The answer’s pretty simple.
1. Novels are about character.
2. Novels are finite.
(It should be pointed out that there are authors who don’t seem to believe in either of these contentions. Without naming names, I’ve read books where character seems as incidental as the font the book’s laid out in, or all the characters seem to be the same person. And I’m sure we’ve all wrestled with the Book That Just Wouldn’t End…you know, you feel like you’re sticking pins in your eyeballs as you keep turning the pages and it seems like you’re further and further from the end…but you’re not going to let the beast get the better of you because a) everyone you know loved it or b) someone compared it to your own writing or c) you bought the hardcover and that’s twenty-five bucks you ain’t gonna see again.)
Back to the subject at hand: live long enough with anyone, even a fictional entity, and you will come to know their character well. But do you really want to subject your readership to that kind of pain? (If so, you are probably a literary writer; send your next 5 stories to the Missouri Review and let me know how it goes.)
Consider your co-workers: over time they evolved from being people who share the air at work to fully-realized humans with flaws and foibles and ethical boundaries and dreams…
…but it took a lot of boring meetings, shared lunch runs, grappling over the last Sharpie in the supply closet, and arguments over whose turn it is to change the toner to get there.
Would that make a good story arc? Hell, no. But kill somebody off — really, just try it tomorrow — and you’ll get to the core of everyone’s character a lot quicker. Because the way we react to the extraordinary tells you a great deal more — or at least, tells it in a much-condensed time frame — than how we behave in the ordinary world.
Let me share an example. Someone at the Littlefield house, and I’m not naming names here, came within an inch of being expelled from high school a while back. Without going into the details of the incident, let me say that the fallout rained stress down on everyone in the family. And each of us did our own stress thing:
• one of us could not believe the unfairness of the administration’s reaction and became belligerent, defiant, and even more argumentative than usual
• One of us decided that her sibling’s troubles provided an excellent backdrop against which to air all her own stored grievances
• One of us came through in spades, applying all the skills he has acquired from a couple of decades of mentoring and managing people to discipline, advise, and guide the person at the center of the controversy
• …and one of us cursed, cried, yelled, apologized, threatened, ate every carb in the house, called all her girlfriends, considered running away, and — can’t believe I’m admitting this — actually threw a punch. A rather lame punch, that glanced ineffectively off her much more muscular son’s thigh, but an act of violence all the same.
The point is that a visitor to our home, while probably anxious to escape, would have a very clear idea of who we are at the core after that week.
That’s because we were all much-magnified by emotional drama. There are plenty of ways to get emotional impact into your stories, but you rarely get more bang for your buck than you do with a good old-fashioned murder.
During the incident I refer to above, some of us did come close to killing others. That would have made it all the more intense and revelatory.
But we didn’t. Which is good, because that would have brought on all the complications of the legal and judicial processes. And that would take away from writing time.
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