~~~~~~
You’ve Got to Be a Little Bad to Be a Good Samaritan
I write a lot of newspaper stories about people who help other people. The two most common reasons they profess to offer help are because it’s right, or because they feel a connection to someone who needs help. They’re good people, and I’ve got to tell you, they inspire me.But in fiction, good people don’t necessarily help you.
Let me give
you an example.
A few years
back, while reviewing some chapters in a high fantasy I’d written, I was vexed
to find that it felt flat. It shouldn’t have. My poor, stressed out and
emotionally beat up wizard was on a river, trying to elude pursuit and get to
my heroine, who was in prison hundreds of miles away. In short, I’d tortured my
wizard character the way a writer is supposed to do.
So why did
the scene feel flat? Should I just cut it? That is what I tend to do when a
scene goes nowhere.
I went
through my writerly checklist to tell me what I needed this scene for, what it
had to accomplish within the larger story, and concluded that I needed to keep
it. There was action in it, too, so it should be interesting. Right?
Then it hit
me where the problem lay. I’d given my wizard an older married couple to carry
him down the river, and while she was a stitch, they were too darned skippy
nice. They just cheerfully took him aboard their boat and oohed and aahed when
he discovered a new way to work his magic.
They had to
have their own agenda. I made them smugglers, although reluctant ones. They needed
money. The wizard offered to pay for passage. But their need to hide something
from my wizard, and their nervousness about it, added the necessary umph and
tension to make the scene interesting.
So if a
scene’s bugging you, and you have characters who want to help, give them an
agenda. You never know where that agenda might lead you. In my current book The
Jaguar Spell, for example, my heroine drops her work in South America
to go to New York to help her friend. Well, she secretly loves him, but she’s
managed to stay away from him for years. Why does she decide to help him now?
She owes him big-time. She’s guilty and hoping for absolution, and knows
absolution could only come if she helps him with something important,
life-threatening. Figuring out why she owed him opened up a whole dimension to
the story that I hadn’t anticipated when I’d sat down to write it.
But, you
protest, some people really do help others from selfless reasons. For those folk,
God bless ‘em. But while in real life we can thank these folk and feel
inspired, in fiction we can’t let them be. A writer’s job is to figure out why
that person acts that way. Do they help because secretly they hope the people
they help will feel grateful to them? Do they help because they want other
people to know they’re helpful? Do they need to shore up their self-image? Do
they figure there’s a karmic payoff — God will see that they did good things
and reward them?
If you’re
still doubting the power of getting good motivations for helper characters, go
see The Avengers. I’m not giving
any spoilers to say that all of those heroes, those alpha males and women, had
their own agendas. The tension of whether they would come together, how they
would take turns helping each other, to defeat Loki and his horde drives the
movie.
All these
examples means there’re many helper motivations to choose from, from the heroic
to the prosaic. It’s a veritable feast of motivations to work with.
I feel the
sudden urge to give blood. I think a local church was having a blood drive.
They had a sign out. Or maybe I should do that ad for the volunteer group that
approached me. Hm…
~~~~~~~~~
Glenda Bodamer is the pen name of a multi-published author of romances that had nothing to do with jaguars, fairy tales, or warehouses. She's attended the revered Clarion SF/Fantasy Writing Workshop, taken a masters in rhetoric of all things, and worked as a professional writer for government, ad agencies, large and small companies, magazines, and newspapers. Glenda and her husband live outside Boston with their two wonderful teenagers—really, she means that wonderful most days—a sweet former shelter hound dog mutt, and more wild turkeys in her neighborhood than she would like.
When Glenda's not writing or driving her teenagers around, she enjoys needlework, making stained glass windows and boxes, and jogging, but not at the same time.