The bottom line-, storytellingpassed the death penalty? Are you in the middle of a fantasy quest?
What if magic spells suddenly did not work at night?
You see what I am getting at: impose a big change in the rules,
or in the social, political, or economic background to your story.
Shake things up. Assassinate your president. See what it does.
Some of the most effective twists and turns are those internal to
characters: the creep who suddenly turns good and grows up; the
beauty who is disfigured and begins hurting others; the loner who
discovers that friends can betray; the jokester who one day can find
no reason to laugh; the upbeat invalid who unexpectedly recovers;
the widow who learns that she is happy alone.
Consider putting your characters through some changes. Isn't
that what a story is for? One of my favorite novels is Irwin Shaw's
Bread upon the Waters. In it, a high school history teacher and his fam-
ily receive ever-growing gifts from a rich gentleman whose life was
saved by the teacher's daughter. Far from improving their condition,
the rich man's rewards tear the family apart and nearly ruin the
teacher's life. To cope with his blessing, the teacher must recognize
that he is cursed.
Irwin Shaw knew how to put his characters through changes. And
how to hold my attention.
SCOPE AND SCALE
What are the stakes in your novel? Life and death? Sorry, that is not
enough.
What do you mean? you ask. What can be more important than a person's
life? Plenty of things: the health of the economy, the fate of democ-
racy, the integrity of the Church, a person's honor, the trust of chil-
dren, the course of history, the outcome of war...
Life and death is easy. Every wanna-be suspense writer can come
up with a premise that puts somebody's life at risk. (Come read my
slush pile and see the evidence.) What not all can do is to devise a
premise in which a whole lot more is at stake: large issues that mat-
ter to us all, not just a few. A premise that transcends ordinary con-
cerns in this way is said to have scale.
Here is one of my favorite large-scale stories of recent years:
Roger MacBride Allen's science fiction novel The Ring of Charon. As