Saturday
Think of movie endings without the desire that preceded them. Dorothy goes home. Luke Skywalker gets a medal. Someone kisses Michael Corleone's ring. Imagine we have no idea what these moments mean to the character. We can guess, of course. It must be nice to get home. A medal ceremony seems cool. Look, Michael has assumed the "father" role. Neato.
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However, we do know what these moments mean. From the very beginning, we've attached ourselves to the character's desire, and it's this desire that, throughout the stories, have given the meaning and emotional resonance to the events. Desire determines why and how the events matter.
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Think of the Olympic games and those stories that precede the event. The stories attempt to answer the questions that would draw us in and make us care and make the event matter. "What does competing in the Olympics mean to this athlete?" "What would it mean to medal?" The stories focus on desire thwarted by obstacles. The more awful, more difficult the obstacle, the more the desire grows into something powerful, meaningful, profound, engaging. Desire mixed with obstacles makes us care, so that we watch with our hearts.
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Desire and obstacles drive the narrative into being to evoke a strong, real emotional response in the reader. The emotion derives from the heart's desire of a character becoming readers' desire and from that moment when it is finally realized.
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Here are some ways (possibly) to make desire work:
- Charged. Is the character willing to go "all in" to realize this desire? Make it the moment that the character decides it's now or never and devotes all his/her resources to get this thing. It is a defining moment.
- Concrete. Is there something very specific that the character wants?—something concrete? For example, a character wanting "finally to matter in this world" needs to have the concrete thing he/she is trying to get that represents that abstract desire. The character might want to win a writing contest, get an A in a course, and so on. Give the character a simple, clear desire.
- Original. Is the desire free of the clichéd, been there-done that sense that kills our interest?
- Attractive. Is the desire something we can root for? Connecting it to archetypal desires helps create readers' vicarious attachment to the story.
- Stakes. There's often talk of "stakes" in stories, the thing to be gained or lost if the desire is or is not fulfilled. Stakes are often artificially raised (if a character doesn't finish fifth grade he doesn't get his million dollar inheritance), so the key's to make the stakes arise organically.
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Maybe in life, we wake up and, out of the blue, we decide to put our desires into action. Short short fiction stories most likely need something to incite that desire. Dorothy gets Miss Gulch's desire to take Toto away from her. Something happens as an irritant to a character's deeper desire, something that rubs against it (as if it were a genie's bottle), bringing its wishes to the surface. In short short fiction, that something often has happened already, and the opening/title hints at what has come before. That ability to allow readers entrance into a character's world at a time without history or explanation is one of the thrills of writing flash. In the first flash fiction pieces I wrote, I clung (maybe too stubbornly) to the idea of a character's story driven into existence by a clear desire:
- A husband has to get his pregnant wife crickets.
- The new poet laureate of Potter County has to write a poem for a building opening.
- A husband has to find his wife and her childhood friend in a game of hide and seek.
- A boyfriend has to stop giving handjobs to his girlfriend's dog.
- A patient suffering from panic has to undergo claustrophobic medical tests.
- A man has to figure out the secret behind the foil wrappers he finds in his date's freezer.
- A father has to find a way to get his son to stop playing soccer.
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So give desire a try. See how late you can enter the story and make it work. And then, when you tire of it, figure out what else you can use to make stories matter.
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