Exciting Adventure!
By Donald Maass | November 1, 2017 |
Flickr Creative Commons: Mike Boenig Photography
It makes you think of movie trailers from the CinemaScope era, the words splashed rapidly left to right across the wide theater screen: Exciting Adventure! The font is 3-D to emphasize the scope and depth of the soon to be released Exciting Adventure!
It makes you think of fairy tales, fantasy quests, Nancy Drew mysteries. You expect to journey, maybe in disguise, perhaps in a circus. There will be danger, or better still peril. You anticipate romance, glass slippers, sleeping princesses kissed awake. There will be villains and rescues. Ogres. Giants. Skeletons with swords. Young protagonists will defeat fierce beasts and cruel bad guys by dint of their wits. The words “dint”, “wits” and “peril” are not out of place.
In short, Exciting Adventure! is a bygone experience, a memory of our childhood, a thrill for a more innocent time, a pleasure no longer possible for we adults who live in a shades-of-gray, no-one-can-be-trusted world of antiheroes and unreliable narrators. We’re too mature for that now, right? We must be serious.
While it’s true that superhero movies are pitched at a teenage level of sophistication, and good-versus-evil is a simplistic theme most resonant in children’s literature, there is no law that says that any story for grownups cannot be exciting. Every novel can capture a sense of adventure. It starts with grasping the true meaning of those words, and utilizing the methods of providing readers with that experience.
In physiology, exciting means stimulating a nerve. That in turn causes a muscle to twitch, or a signal to race to the brain. In electricity, exciting means causing movement or creating a magnetic field. In physics, exciting means making an atom or molecule more active.
In fiction, exciting means stirring emotions, arousing, awakening, and impelling protagonists to go places and do things. You don’t need castles, magic mirrors, captured princesses or handsome princes for that. The key effects are: 1) stirring emotions in readers, and 2) stirring characters to action.
Adventure is most often associated with travel: going somewhere, seeing new things, being amazed and challenged by what is unfamiliar, unexpected, exotic, romantic, risky and/or nerve-tingling. Adventure is something that cannot be experienced at home, we imagine, but in truth a sense of adventure is not dependent on going anywhere.
Having an adventure means experiencing what is unusual. It means facing danger, taking a risk, seeking one’s fortune, trusting in luck. It means feeling anticipation, expectation, hope and fear. The root of the word adventure is the Latin adventūra, meaning what is about to happen to anyone. Think of it as the arrival of a venture. Adventure.
So, let’s see how these ideas might apply to your WIP:
What sort of actions by others cause you to feel outrage, alarm, dismay or helpless fury? As you bring us into your story world, what happens there that is the most like that? Open with that event.
What would rock your protagonist’s world, upend his or her assumptions, knock him or her for a loop, cause him or her to question everything he or she believes and holds sacred? What can shatter your protagonist’s trust of someone or everyone? Introduce your protagonist at that moment.
What does your protagonist want? Turn that into something your protagonist must do. Make it big.
Having set that task, twist and complicate it until it becomes impossible. Make your protagonist unprepared or incapable.
Who rules this world? Give that person more power, and more unwillingness to allow your protagonist to act. Forbid your protagonist from acting. Warn of punishment.
Who believes in and encourages your protagonist regardless? Who says, take a risk? Who proclaims, I believe in you? Who promises, you can do it…and you must, if not for others then for yourself? What reward is in store?
Who begs, charges or challenges your protagonist? In what way does your protagonist know that what is to come is a test?
What are the three riddles, tasks, or dangers your protagonist must answer, do, or face in order to succeed? What must be brought back as proof, and to whom?
What would be reckless for your protagonist to do? What would be a gamble? What might fail miserably? What could succeed against all odds, and how?
How can your protagonist have more at risk? How can the story’s outcome become win-or-lose, get-it-all-or-get-nothing? Bring it down to a single moment: win or lose, success or failure, hope against hope versus certain defeat.
In what way is your protagonist clever? What trick can your protagonist work that no one else thinks of?To what are we human beings blind? Make your protagonist blind to that as well. What single sight or event will open your protagonist’s eyes? Plant that.
Whom does your protagonist encounter who is unusual? Make that person odd or puzzling.
What happens in your story world that is uncommon? Make it utterly strange or bizarre, something that doesn’t happen here, something unexplainable or magic.
The big thing that happens (inciting incident): twist it until it becomes strange, stunning, weird, lurid, creepy, curious, provocative, base, attractive, awful, amazing, tempting, seductive, dangerous or in any way unsafe. Draw your protagonist to it.
To what weakness does your protagonist succumb? What sin can he or she not resist? How does he or she regret that, or show remorse? What does his or her conscience demand? How will we know that he or she still has a good heart?
Who in the story can cast a spell or create a magnetic field? To whom is everyone attracted? Who does everyone fear? Give that person a bigger role, more to do, and a singular focus on your protagonist.
Does your protagonist crush on someone? Tease us with will-they-or-won’t-they? Make the love interest reluctant. Delay gratification. Make your protagonist first prove himself or herself worthy.
As your protagonist faces defeat, what would be a piece of luck? Who can ride to the rescue, or arrive at the last minute with help?
An exciting adventure can take us to faraway lands or take place in our own back yards. The biggest risk is not a loss of fortune, but a loss of face. The love we yearn hardest for is not the one we can’t have, but the one we don’t deserve. The outcome readers cheer for is the one that’s the most impossible. The greatest hope we have for protagonists is for a happiness that’s out of reach. All of that potential exists in the story you’re telling now.
Can your story become an exciting adventure? It already is if you take the time to go there, do that, and bring it back. Close your eyes and click your heels three times. There. We’re off to see the wizard, on a journey to get safely home.
How can your WIP become an exciting adventure? What will you add, twist, heighten and risk? How will you grab us in the gut, raise our pulses, and put our hearts in our throats?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
Thank you Don for this swashbuckling post.
My WIP is a type of adventure. A woman goes on a journey to discover who saved her life and why, but I was planning on having all the true stakes be internal to her. She starts the story jaded and closed off, and ends up opening herself up more as the story unfolds.
Do you have any reading recommendations that might help?
Off the top of my head, authors who are good at turning characters’ needs into things they must do: Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Naomi Novik. R.J. Ellory, Robert McCammon, Daphne Du Maurier, Amor Towles, John Green, Stieg Larsson.
And about three hundred others. Hmm, might be an interesting study here, maybe a chart: column A is inner needs, column B the outward tasks. Three hundred titles. I wonder what patterns we’d see?
I just read an interview with Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series. He believes that characters should always be the same, should not have a character arc–although, for certain, there’s a great deal of adventure in his stories. Character arcs, he says, is an academic notion that has no place in modern fiction. An unchanging character certainly works for him with 22 novels starring his unrelenting tough guy. What are your thoughts on that, Don?
I sat at lunch with Lee this past summer, but didn’t get an opening to grill him. Lee Child, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan all, ask me, have a lot to answer for. They make it look effortless to create characters with blank surfaces who even so seem to have great depth. Where are the warning labels for other writers? *Don’t try this at home, kids.*
Seriously, though, I disagree with Lee. Change has emotional impact. Characters like Reacher or Bond or Travis McGee who are “unchanging” work because while they may have a placid surface, even a delightful sang froid, we sense that beneath the surface they are roiling. Their actions show us that they have inner tension.
It’s a neat trick. The best pulp writers knew how to pull that off, and Lee is a master at it. It’s also a trick that works best with series characters. And for Ishiguro and McEwan, curse them. That’s my take.
Can it be that there’s a comfort factor in knowing what to expect from a character that you like and can just settle in with for a bang-up story, an adventurous ride through mayhem that has a happyish ending for someone in the story? What would change through a character arc bring to that equation? If no change equals no emotional impact, what is it that satisfies the fans of these authors and has them coming back for more? Story?
Yes, story primarily, I’d say so. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a legitimate storytelling mode, just not the only one.
Just to be clear: Lee enjoys playing the provocateur, and has been known to make these kinds of statements simply to savor the reaction. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, but he’s happy to defend an extreme position if it will make the discussion more lively.
I have no idea what to make of the idea that “modern” fiction has no place for a character that changes — I’d argue the exact opposite is true.
I wrote a Writer’s Digest piece on this recently, and noted that to learn is to grow and to grow is to change, so it’s virtually impossible for a character not to change if the dramatic action is in any way meaningful. (Half a century ago Lajos Egri in The Art of Dramatic Writing stated that the only place where a character can go through a series of conflicts and not change is in the realm of bad writing.) That doesn’t mean the character has to have a Saul on the Road to Damascus epiphany; the change may result in nothing more that a “new normal.”
And Reacher, along with many other protagonists in crime fiction, are often “traveling angels” who peregrinate from place to place or situation to situation, spot a problem, and deal with it. (Mary Poppins is a non-crime example.) In such stories, it’s the other characters or the situation that changes, not the hero.
But, as Don rightly notes, that doesn’t mean they lack complexity. I’ve been enjoying the Bond novels in their new audio format, and have marveled at how much more interesting the novel Bond is compared to his film incarnation.
But though traveling angels do, indeed, travel, they seldom go on a PERSONAL journey or adventure. Their task is always to right wrongs with their unique talents and skills and insights. But they still encounter something new at every stop, and we experience it with them.
Thus many of Don’s suggestions still apply–if not for the hero than for the people he or she helps along the way.
“Traveling angel”. I like that.
Interesting what you say about Bond. The recent films seem to me unable to stay away from Bond’s deep psychology: his lonely Scottish upbringing, orphan status, mother-fixation on M.
It’s like Holmes. Or Kirk. Or Batman. Leave character mysteries dangling and people can’t resist trying to explain them. Is that for the better? I wonder.
I talked about this in a recent seminar where I discussed villains (among other things). We know little about Iago or Richard III — Shakespeare routinely said nothing about motives, allowing the audience to do the work.
In contrast, Thomas Harris in Red Dragon elaborates Francis Dolarhyde’s background in great detail–but what makes him fascinating is his obsession with Blake’s painting of the Red Dragon. To use Jung’s terminology, Francis then experiences “pathological archetypal inflation,” i.e., he not only identifies with the Red Dragon, he believes he IS the Red Dragon.
I like “traveling angels” a lot, gives me a way to think about character. Thanks, David.
I love these suggestions and questions! Great writing prompts to nudge, prompt, push characters towards action of all sorts (and consequentially, released emotion). In the final rewrite of my latest novel (now being shopped by my agent), I pushed my protagonist to the point where she ended up homeless for a night, filthy (for plot-related reasons), and fired from her job (all of which hadn’t happened in the previous six drafts). One stupid decision after another led her to this breaking point where she had to figure out how her own choices were limiting the life she could have and consciously make a change. What I realized was how much the story needed these increased stakes and how much clearer her trajectory was when things got that much harder. What surprised me, though, was how much more fun it was to push her into such desperate places and watch her process stuff, then figure out a way forward. Thanks for this post!
I like that. Homelessness could happen to any of us. It’s a possibility closer than we may believe. Way to grab us in the gut.
Fantastic, as usual. I will print this one out!
In my new WIP, my protagonist should keep her head down and avoid anything that could get her into trouble but she doesn’t, of course. All adventures involve risk. There has to be a good reason why she leaves her safe world after the inciting incident, which is very unusual. Could briefly meeting the victim before he dies and curiosity be enough?
Curiosity is good, but perhaps guilt is stronger? Could she have done something that would have prevented the death? (Always digging for deeper and more emotional motives.)
YES! Great idea. It will only take a simple revision. Thank you.
This one is a printer, Don! Printed and saved to savor again and again.
Thanks!
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth
We’ve got to keep those printer companies in business, right? Glad you like this post!
“Who believes in and encourages your protagonist regardless? Who says, take a risk? Who proclaims, I believe in you? Who promises, you can do it…and you must, if not for others then for yourself? What reward is in store?”
Hey, Don. Another doozy. It’s happy hour here in Bavaria, and I’m delighted that I got a quiet moment to read your post before dinner. I was feeling pretty good about the WIP as I read through the prompts, and I sort of skipped over the one above, but then I went back. And… Huh. I got nuthin’. And I can’t stop thinking about it. Who *is* behind Vahl, egging him on, making promises (that most certainly can’t be kept)? It’s not really Elan anymore. Maybe papa’s ghost? It’s sort of great to be stumped. It feels like an important set of questions, which encourages me that promise lies within them.
Thanks for the food for ponder. If I don’t come up with anything sooner, it’ll be great for the plane ride home.
Bavaria? Oh, you poor guy. Get home safe and soon. Must be awful over there. Lousy beer. Terrible sausages.
Hi, Don:
I’m working on an adventure of this sort right now. Your suggestions are wonderful, thanks. The main things I keep asking myself:
1. How can I make the journey keep challenging or intensifying the bond between my two fellow travelers?
2. How can I make the “realistic” places they visit mythic in dimension–i.e., how can I show them to be both strange and universal?
3. How many ways could this next scene happen? What’s the most interesting? What’s the most surprising? What’s the most dramatic? How can I craft one that is all three? What tests my characters the most and in what ways?
I’m copying this post and using it for a checklist as I proceed. Thanks a million (as always).
Most welcome, my friend. Same back to you. Reading your posts I always inadequate…uh, I mean inspired. Onward.
Oh, golly. Your question about the the three riddles, etc., startled me. Looking at my (realistic) WIP as if it were a fairy tale gives me a new way to make it bigger. I love the idea of hinting at resonances from our first stories. Thank you!
It is interesting to me that the fairy tales we reference, the childhood favorites that we remember, and the classics that we reread as adults are often not the way we write our own fiction. Not even close.
Why is that?
We’re afraid to be that honest about what we want and what we’ll do to get it – or is that our characters?
I don’t have an answer, Don. What I *have* carried forward from my childhood reading into the adult fiction I write is a strong sense of right and wrong, of integrity and personal responsibility, of compassion. If you are kind to the old woman you meet on the path, you might get rewarded with a magic cloak. If you are open and honest like Jack (always the third one to try the impossible), you might be the one to succeed. And, of course, it’s good to be open to the possibility of magic (something unexpected, even unearned).
Regarding the main character as “traveling angel”: I think it was K.M. Weiland who pointed out in her blog that while these characters do not change over the course of the story, the characters around them do as a direct result of their interactions with that person. So change is integral to the story, just not to the main character. Call it the Lone Ranger school of fiction.