Rock and a Hard Place
Random thought: You know you have an obscene amount of music on your iPod when a new song by Beck comes on and you didn't even realize you downloaded it.
Moving on . . . I had a migraine last night for the first time in a year. After it started to mildly subside, I watched an old Law & Order because knitting or reading were out of the question. It was about a child sociopath. A scary, creepy child sociopath who murdered another child. Because Law & Order is always so happy. But it got me thinking.
So much of the best of fiction is about your main character's rock meeting the hard place. Like the episode of Law & Order. You could imagine being a mother, totally loving and adoring her child. I've given birth four times, and each moment of birth, there is this unexplainable breaking of your heart as its capacity for love is expanded beyond what you thought you were capable of to make room for this child you would die for. . . . When I gave birth to baby #3, it was with a catheter in my heart, and a cardiologist in the room (and yes, I did do the insane and have a 4th)--and I said to the baby's dad . . . "If it's between ME and the BABY, choose the baby and don't ever regret it." You love your baby--even UNMET--THAT much. So now you can imagine being the mother of a child in this episode. A mother's love. But then the unspeakable happens and the kid starts killing the family pets and catching and dismembering little mice, on his way to a real murder. And the D.A. has the intention of trying the 12-year-old as an adult. And there is no way you can imagine your CHILD going away for LIFE with no possibility of parole at age 12. So what do you do? Hide your child? Run away? Go on the lam? Turn him in? Rock . . . meet hard place. [As an aside, in my own little birth drama, imagine being the father having to make that call? Baby or mother? Real life is FULL of these dramas.]
This is what editors mean when they say raise the stakes. So that the squeeze in on. The soul is tortured . . . and the main character must come to discover what he or she is made of. Morality is all well and good--when you don't have to LIVE your moral code under the worst of circumstances.
Clicking through channels last night, I saw the last 15 minutes of 8MM with Nicholas Cage and James Gandolfini. Same thing. Cage discovers the underground snuff film culture and he turns vigilante. It was all well and good to be moral until he faced TRUE depravity, then executioner seemed like the better option.
In The Roofer, Tom has two choices when he discovers Ava's secret. She has two choices when he does what he does. In a completely unscientific sense, judging from the reader emails I got after that book's release, 98% supported the choices made. But there was a percentage that felt Ava was morally bankrupt. That she made the wrong choice.
Pull it into less life or death . . . take a comedy . . . when I wrote Spanish Disco, Cassie Hayes was content to walk away from the fiasco of Roland Riggs's sequel. UNTIL she found out her boss and best friend, Lou, bet the farm so to speak. Got himself into hock, risked his small publishing company, just to get his hands on the sequel. Which meant she needed that sequel. No matter what. Rock, meet hard place.
Thoughts? Does this dilemma drive your fiction? In my thinking, comedy or drama, it should.
Moving on . . . I had a migraine last night for the first time in a year. After it started to mildly subside, I watched an old Law & Order because knitting or reading were out of the question. It was about a child sociopath. A scary, creepy child sociopath who murdered another child. Because Law & Order is always so happy. But it got me thinking.
So much of the best of fiction is about your main character's rock meeting the hard place. Like the episode of Law & Order. You could imagine being a mother, totally loving and adoring her child. I've given birth four times, and each moment of birth, there is this unexplainable breaking of your heart as its capacity for love is expanded beyond what you thought you were capable of to make room for this child you would die for. . . . When I gave birth to baby #3, it was with a catheter in my heart, and a cardiologist in the room (and yes, I did do the insane and have a 4th)--and I said to the baby's dad . . . "If it's between ME and the BABY, choose the baby and don't ever regret it." You love your baby--even UNMET--THAT much. So now you can imagine being the mother of a child in this episode. A mother's love. But then the unspeakable happens and the kid starts killing the family pets and catching and dismembering little mice, on his way to a real murder. And the D.A. has the intention of trying the 12-year-old as an adult. And there is no way you can imagine your CHILD going away for LIFE with no possibility of parole at age 12. So what do you do? Hide your child? Run away? Go on the lam? Turn him in? Rock . . . meet hard place. [As an aside, in my own little birth drama, imagine being the father having to make that call? Baby or mother? Real life is FULL of these dramas.]
This is what editors mean when they say raise the stakes. So that the squeeze in on. The soul is tortured . . . and the main character must come to discover what he or she is made of. Morality is all well and good--when you don't have to LIVE your moral code under the worst of circumstances.
Clicking through channels last night, I saw the last 15 minutes of 8MM with Nicholas Cage and James Gandolfini. Same thing. Cage discovers the underground snuff film culture and he turns vigilante. It was all well and good to be moral until he faced TRUE depravity, then executioner seemed like the better option.
In The Roofer, Tom has two choices when he discovers Ava's secret. She has two choices when he does what he does. In a completely unscientific sense, judging from the reader emails I got after that book's release, 98% supported the choices made. But there was a percentage that felt Ava was morally bankrupt. That she made the wrong choice.
Pull it into less life or death . . . take a comedy . . . when I wrote Spanish Disco, Cassie Hayes was content to walk away from the fiasco of Roland Riggs's sequel. UNTIL she found out her boss and best friend, Lou, bet the farm so to speak. Got himself into hock, risked his small publishing company, just to get his hands on the sequel. Which meant she needed that sequel. No matter what. Rock, meet hard place.
Thoughts? Does this dilemma drive your fiction? In my thinking, comedy or drama, it should.
Labels: dilemmas
posted by Erica Orloff at 11:28 AM
9 comments
