Feelin' The Love

Loving Your Characters While Raising The Stakes

To make a reader care about your work…your book, your short story, your characters, you have to “raise the stakes”…at least that’s what the experts tell us. This is a tough row to hoe at times. Of course I want my fiction to be compelling…I want Baker to be memorable and honorable and interesting. But I can’t make him that way if I allow him to live in a vacuum. Whether I like it or not, I have to toss problems in his direction and let him solve them.

I confess, this hurts me sometimes. He finds himself in peril…standing on the edge of a cliff, looking into the barrel of a gun with nowhere to go. He looks at me with his eyebrow cocked. “Why?” he wants to know. “Why do you do this to me over and over and over?”

I could say something trite like “Because I love you.” Ugh. Too cliché. I could say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” but that would be a lie and we all know it. I guess if I wanted to give Baker a good answer as I write him to the edge of the cliff and over the side I’d say, “I want you to grow. I want to make you better.”

But still I sense his bewilderment and the sense of betrayal he feels as I toss him over the edge with nothing beneath but jagged rocks crawling with starving crocodiles; nothing above but a pack of rabid wolves, three carnivorous bears, a wolverine, and a skunk; and a python slinking its way along the scraggly branch from which Baker hangs.

“Come on, man, this is no fair,” he says.

Ok, I say it. “I do this because I love you.” And in a weird way, I mean it. Today, I don’t think he believes me.