Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks Page B

the antagonist, the greater the demands placed on the protagonist, to put it another way. If we are to be compelled by what happens to our main character over the course of the story, we must see him or her challenged in an appropriately demonstrable way. We don’t want to read some four hundred pages only to discover the obstacles faced were never really much of anything after all. This doesn’t mean we have to see a protagonist placed in a life-and-death situation every time out in order not to be disappointed. It means that given the nature of the story, the conflict facing the protagonist must be real and challenging.
    Don’t forget that the antagonist in a story isn’t always a person. It might be an animal or a monster. It might be an appliance or a vehicle; Stephen King has written more than a few of those. It might be the weather or a mountain or an inhospitable climate. It might be an impending cataclysmic event, like a nuclear explosive on the verge of detonation. It might be a disfiguring injury or a life-threatening disease. But in each instance, the size of the threat—its immediacy, perversity, potential consequences, and so on—will provide a way to measure the courage, resolve, and strength of character of our protagonist.
    So Maud Manx must be made to rise to the nature of the threat posed by Feral Finch, by the fears and doubts his coming engenders, and by the limitations placed on her by age and disability. How successful I am at depicting all this will determine how engaged the reader becomes in the story, how compelled by the action, and how concerned for the story’s outcome. Ultimately, it will determine whether or not the book works as a thriller.
    Whew! All those other chapters were so short, and this one is only half done! At least it’s the tougher half. It gets much easier from here. Nevertheless, let’s take a break in case you want to turn out the lights and get some sleep, and we’ll pick up on things in the next chapter. I’ll go put out the cat.

 
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    Readers will accept almost anything from
you if you don’t make them feel they
have wasted their time and money.
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    Â 
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    M AUD M ANX ,
P ART T WO
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    WELL, HERE WE are again, back in our virtual classroom, ready for another look at those valuable rules of writing. I know I shouldn’t say this, but even though I believe strongly in their value, some of them may not work for you. This is true about all writing rules and all books on writing, and you have to be able to pull out what will help
you
and discard what doesn’t. Of course, I think my advice is pretty good, but oddly enough, other writers feel the same way about their advice. Such is life. You have to make up your own mind.
    Anyway, back to Maud Manx, Feral Finch, and their adventures in the thriller
Cat Chaser
.
    The single most violated rule of writing is the one I want to talk about next, and you ignore me in this instance at your peril.
    Rule six goes like this: SHOW, DON’T TELL.
    I’ll bet you’ve heard that one before. Almost everyone has. Certainly everyone who comes into one of my classes on writing fiction has. Three little words, and they seem to cause writers a world of trouble.
    What those words are saying is that writers need to remember that the less we see of them during the course of their stories, the better. It is the characters and the plot of a book that are involving, not the writer. The writer needs to reveal the story through the words and actions of the characters, not through his or her narration of them. Everything that happens in a book should take place as if the writer wasn’t present. We should be able to read a story through from beginning to end without any awareness at all of an author presence.
    The problem arises when the writer violates the Show, Don’t Tell rule. What happens is that the writer starts
telling
us about characters and events, rather in the way of