Confession: I am a wimp when it comes to inflicting trouble and danger on the characters in my fiction. I know well that I am far, far too gentle with them, and if my tales are to contain any tension, or any suspense—not to mention character arc—this really won’t do.
In spite of my fondness for a well-turned murder mystery, I usually avoid reading detailed accounts of acts of violence. My visual imagination and, worse, my memory are too strong. I got only a little way into Jeffrey Eugenides’ supposedly marvelous novel Middlesex before a graphic description of a family slaughtered by bayonet-wielding soldiers stopped me reading any further, and images from that passage still return, years later, to haunt me. This is a testimony, perhaps, to the vividness of Eugenides’ writing, but I just can’t handle vivid writing on such topics.
Still, there’s a lot of territory between gruesome horrors and a tale so free of challenges to its protagonists that nothing whatsoever happens to them. If I hope to attract any reader who prefers a seascape to a placid pond, this is a territory I must begin to explore, and to claim.
Somebody (possibly Theresa Meyers – http://www.theresameyers.com/) once said in a presentation at a Peninsula Romance Writers meeting, “Think of the very worst thing that could happen to your heroine—and then make it three times worse!” At the time I knew it was good advice, but I am still struggling to implement it. I don’t want to be cruel to my characters; I’m too fond of them.
Luckily for me, my characters, like my children and grandchildren, seem to have strong wills of their own. I might do my timid smother-mother best to keep them sheltered and safe, but wouldn’t you know, they still insist on wandering out into dangerous territory—of the heart as much as of the body—and they learn, and they grow, and they survive.