Now isn’t that just the sort of title you would expect to be the lead-in for an article on the antagonist…that heavy-handed son of a gun who’s forever wanting to prevent the good guy from doing what he’s supposed to be doing, the dastard! The heartless so-and-so, the gall-darned…oh, fiddlesticks! Maybe I should just use the kind of language that makes the angels weep and get it over with. ‘Evil Bastard’. There…I did it. And now I feel all tingly inside. Mwaha. MWAHAHAH!!
(I’ve always wondered about using curse words in writing. Authenticity verses accessibility…or in my own view, “How I talk to my buddies” versus “Oh my god, I can’t write that! My mother’s going to read that, and she still knows where the soap is kept.” Anyhoo…)
…and no, actually, I’m not talking about the antagonist. There’s someone far more dangerous to your principal characters, far more bloodthirsty and terrifying. After all, there is nothing in this universe that a fictional character fears more than…you, the writer.
I think that just about everyone has had that one particular back-of-the-car childhood experience. You know, where your parents are taking you somewhere fun, or out to dinner somewhere…which was the absolute height of cool back when I could still count my age on both hands. You’re sitting there in the car, strapped down with your seat-belt, thinking about a delicious root beer float, or chocolate cream pie, or just pilfering 10 packs of sugar and downing them when nobody’s looking, until pretty soon you’re so wound up and twitchy that actually ingesting sugar seems somewhat redundant. Suddenly, out of nowhere, your brother jabs you in the arm for no reason and giggles to himself. Of course when he did so, he had to reach past your sister’s face, and in the course of doing so ended up rubbing his elbow against her nose. So, now she’s all indignant and hits him in the ribs, just as you’re doing the same thing to his shoulder while mouthing the words “Stop it!”…and pretty soon the entire back seat is like something out of the world wrestling hall of fame.
And then, those famous words would get fired into the back of the car from the adults sitting in the front, and they were always something to the effect of “All of you, stop fooling around and behave yourselves, or I will turn this car around and we can forget about going to ______!”, where _______ was equal to the object of our desire at the time.
Now, this was usually enough to get us to shape up, and there’s a good reason for that. One time early in our career as children, my two siblings and I all got to the point where we’d heard that phrase enough to disregard it, and it became just another way of saying “You kids are making a lot of noise.” We’d hear it when we were mucking around, quickly calculate our current decibal level, halve it, and proceed with doing what we were doing that our parents wanted us to stop. In our minds, the danger was never actually real. We were like testosterone-filled soccer players who routinely kicked opposing players in the face and had never been shown anything other than a yellow card.
And then, one day…red card. Tweet!
The shock, the horror, to suddenly become aware of the fact that those particular words being said to you in that order weren’t just background noise, but an actual potential consequence. Looking out of the car window and realizing forlornly that you were, in fact, returning home…sans food, and sitting behind parents who had just about had it up to here*.
(*Make a salute, and then tilt your hand so that it’s level with your eyebrows. That’s were ‘here’ always was…)
Had to be done, too. I realize this now, though at the time it was one of the most unfair and unjust things I’d ever experienced. (After all, it wasn’t *me* that had misbehaved. Not *really*…) If someone threatens to pull the plug on something and never ever does, after a while you just say “Yeah yeah yeah. Whatever.” If someone threatens to do the same, and has actually done so before…whole different story.
So, every now and then you’ve got to do it. You can’t just foreshadow something that’s going to happen and then manage to miraculously save your characters, or somehow have them extricate themselves from every single bad situation. If you make threats of that nature, you’re eventually going to have to make good on your threats in order to get the reader to believe you’re not a flake. You’ve got to unleash the beast from time to time, do something so cruel and upsetting that your reader actually stops mid-paragraph and says “NO!” with their mouth agape. Sometimes it means breaking your own heart and killing or maiming a character you really really like, just because you know what kind of an impact that will have.
Mortality is everywhere in literature. There’s the sudden loss of a loved one that turns the main character into a loner, a tragic figure who becomes lost and introspective. Being a ‘best friend’ in a hard-boiled detective novel is practically begging for death. I read this one book series which had one of the main characters die by chapter three, and which had *the* main heroic figure die by the third book, at which point the story began to focus on his friends and son picking up the threads of their new reality and attempting to cope. As a reader, it was hard to take…but it had to be done.
My own story is no exception; one of the most likable and heroic protagonists will die prior to completing his lifelong ambition, and a cheerful light-hearted girl will lose her legs. With this I hope to make my readers cry, not because I want them to be sad or because I’m a sadist, but because the concepts of value and cost are hopelessly entwined, and in order to properly appreciate and understand the true value of what my characters have done, a price needs to be paid.
Trust me. I may not enjoy it, and it may hurt like hell as I’m writing it, but it’ll hurt a lot less later on as a result. Imagine if nobody took the ‘danger’ you were writing for your characters seriously…
“Slowly, they crept towards the trunk. The ominous scratching got louder, and louder, until sudde-…”
“It’s a cat, isn’t it.”
“…”
“Well? Isn’t it?”
“Uhm, yes. But it could have been something else! Something faaarrrr more sinister and fearsome!”
“Yeah yeah, whatever. It’s always a cat, just like the loud ‘bang’ is always a car backfiring. Come on…get on to the next chapter, monkey. Let’s get this over with.”
