Sandra’s Miscellany

When I first wrote The Orchid Hunter, I allowed Jessie to achieve everything she needed to achieve — catch the bad guy, get the love interest, save her great-uncle. But during revisions, I realized I was missing a crucial dramatic opportunity. There was, in the final analysis, nothing at stake for Jessie. So while the adventure may have been fun and the writing decent, there was nothing to care about because I hadn’t given the reader a reason to root for her.

In other words, I’d failed to create a dark moment.

Robin Popp was instrumental in helping me discover this. She’d given a presentation at my local RWA chapter and in the course of it quoted from Dwight Swain’s Techniques for the Selling Writer. Two things she relayed from Swain that stuck with me were “foreshadow the climax” and “box in the hero.”

I headed right out and bought Swain’s book. To date, it’s the only craft book I’ve kept and look at periodically.

“Foreshadow the climax” was the eureka statement for me. In The Orchid Hunter, I had beautifully foreshadowed a climax that I hadn’t written. Unfortunately, it was the right climax for the book. I say “unfortunately” because I didn’t want to write a scene in which a good person was going to die.

So the first major lesson is that something must be at stake for the heroine.

It’s very easy to put at stake the life of someone the heroine loves to get a powerful book. In this type of story, the emotional buy-in of the heroine is necessary, and that automatically hooks the reader. The emotion is front and center.

It’s less easy to put at stake something like the heroine’s sense of honor or duty or “the right thing” because those are abstract, intellectual concepts. Sure, they’ll have some emotional impact as the heroine struggles with doing what she believes to be best, but that emotion is ancillary, not necessary. For me, this makes things pretty difficult. I have to dig hard to find the emotion underlying the heroine’s determination to do the right thing.

Okay, so let’s say you’ve figured out what’s at stake for your heroine. She’s determined to {fill in the blank} at the risk of what? Her life? Her career? Her reputation?

Now we get to the fun part: removing the heroine’s options. Swain calls this “boxing in the hero.” Basically what we’re doing is removing every option the heroine has for achieving her goal. In many cases, this can be achieved simply by throwing obstacles in her path.

Let’s say the heroine needs to reach her best friend in Los Angeles before the bad guy kidnaps her. The heroine’s in New York and obviously has to reach Los Angeles first to be successful. So to toss an obstacle in her path, we cause LAX to shut down because of extremely bad weather. Now the heroine has to change her plan. She decides to drive cross-country, so she gets in her car and heads out.

If we’re mean to her, we can have the car break down halfway there — after all, it’s an older car and the mechanic she uses has recently suffered lapses in his health, so perhaps his mind wasn’t entirely on his job. But if we really want to be mean to her and ramp up the conflict between her and the villain, we’ll have the villain send a hired thug to switch her battery cables while she’s at a rest stop. Now that she’s confronted with this situation, she’ll have to devise another method for getting to LA. Perhaps she hitches a ride with a friendly truck driver or with a retired couple in their RV. Even better, she might steal the retirees’ RV while they’re eating at the diner.

With each obstacle, the heroine’s situation has to become more and more desperate, and with each choice she makes, she has to skate closer and closer to her own sense of right and wrong. Just what lengths will she go to in order to save her best friend? She’ll steal a retirees’ RV, but would she shoot a man?

So we finally allow the heroine to get to LA. She’s so close to achieving her goal that we have to pull the rug out from under feet. The simplest scenario? She’s too late. The villain has already made off with the friend. Now the situation is even more desperate because the heroine knows it’s only a matter of time before the villain does something horrific — like drop the woman off a cliff or bury her alive.

Now we have to set up the “lose-lose” situation. This is where the rubber meets in the road in terms of character drama and development. This is where we devise a situation in which the heroine has two choices:

1. Do the morally wrong thing and get everything she wants.
2. Do the morally right thing and lose everything she has set out to achieve.

Now, in the case of our scenario above, we’re talking about her making a choice between saving her friend’s life and not saving it. That’s pretty damn high stakes, isn’t it? How can a reader not be totally hooked into that decision?

So we have to have something huge enough to cause the heroine to think twice about saving her best friend. What could possibly cause her to do that? The threat of nuclear war? The lives of hundreds of people are balanced against this one person’s, so that either they will be saved or the friend will?

You can see where this scenario will put the heroine through the emotional wringer. And if the story is written in a compelling manner, the reader will be put through the emotional wringer, too.

The heroine, by virtue of being the heroine, must always do the right thing. That means she must give up what means the most to her personally and suffer the consequences of that loss.

This is never easy to write. It goes against every cell in our happily-ever-after desiring bodies. But it’s also the means by which the reader sees exactly what this heroine is made of. The reader agonizes with her and respects her, roots for her and cries for her.

It was really tough to rewrite that dark moment for Jessie, but when I did it, I knew I had it. This was the story my storyteller self had wanted to tell, but that I, Sandra, was afraid to tell. Discovering that dark moment and then rewriting to achieve it was one of the best writing and personal lessons I’ve ever learned. It taught me about how to pinpoint the emotional truth of my story and build up the events around it.

So if your story lacks punch during the dark moment, ask yourself: What’s at stake for the heroine in this story? What does she desperately want to keep and therefore must give up?

Then make her give it up.

Next in this little series: Give her what she deserves.