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A tree
falls in the woods. Do you care? Perhaps, but what if there was a nest of an
endangered birds in the top? Do you care now?
That
might be enough to reel some readers in, but the biggest grab of all is to put
people in the mix. If people are in harm’s way, readers are drawn into the
story. They have to know what happens next.
When
the stakes are higher, the story matters. It carries weight and resonance,
especially if it’s well done.
So,
let’s make the stakes higher for that tree falling in the woods. What if the
tree fell across an access road, and that road was the only way for a
mountaintop community to reach medical care, and a pregnant woman is in labor?
Jayne
Ann Krentz used this scenario in her 1993 release Hidden Talents. I mention
this nearly 20-year-old book because that story and those characters still
resonate with me, all these many years later.
There’s
a reason we love reading books by bestselling authors. They know how to raise
the stakes and make us care.
To
make a short detour into craft, raising the stakes means layering the
characters with strengths and weaknesses. Story events keep pushing the
characters into areas where their strengths and weaknesses come into play.
It
sometimes means having characters lose control.
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She
kicks her cheating husband out, works on a story about the nudist colony for
her newspaper boss, even though she wants nothing to do with naked people. She
races home to meet her son’s school bus and there’s her husband, mad because
his key no longer fits in the door.
Do you
care what happens next? Can you predict what Molly will do when she’s been
pushed to her limits? Here’s a snip of Murder in the Buff to whet your
interest:
…A familiar red pickup in the driveway gleamed in the
dappled sunlight around the oak-shaded house. Hadley’s truck. I thought of all
the times the sight of his truck had brought me pleasure, of how we’d sneak
away to snatch some together time.
Little did I know he’d been sneaking around other
places as well. He wasn’t worming his way back into my life. No way, no how.
I’d rather starve and go to the poor house before I allowed him one ounce of
sympathy.
A tide of anger came over me, washing away logic and
common sense. I wanted to hurt him as much as he’d hurt me. He loved that
freshly waxed truck more than life itself. I gunned my Suburban and rammed his
truck. Glass broke. Metal crunched. I rocketed forward against my seatbelt
restraint…
Molly
valued staying in control above all else, and now she’s out of control. Even
though she’s done something terrible, now she has to deal with the aftermath.
Does a
particular character from a favorite book still resonate with you? Share it
with me and you’ll automatically be entered in a drawing for an electronic
download of Murder in the Buff, my campy cozy mystery.
Happy
July everyone!
Maggie
Toussaint
ABOUT MAGGIE
ABOUT MAGGIE
Formerly
a scientist and currently a freelance reporter, Southern author Maggie
Toussaint loves to mix murder and romance in her fiction. With nine published
books to her credit, her latest release is Death, Island Style. Toussaint is an
active member of Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, and
Sisters in Crime. Visit her at www.maggietoussaint.com
