It's very rare for a book to make me
cry. It's very rare for something even to come close.
Same
goes for films, television, whatever. There are a few things, there
are moments when I get mawkish and sentimental,1
there are the few guaranteed tearjerkers in the world, but when my
contemporaries were sobbing buckets over poor old Cedric Diggory, the
best I could manage was a shrug. “Kill the spare”, splat –
well, quite. If you insist.
In
fact, I've always had a bit of beef with J.K about that whole
business. Sure, she killed Sirius Black, and she killed him totally
unfairly2,
but in the last book she promised us a Weasley. Go on, then, I
thought – she's not going to do for Ron, but Ginny maybe? Or
Arthur. Definitely Arthur.
Fred? You
what?
Okay.
Better Fred than George3.
You whack the Weasley who's got a double? What a bloody cop out.
Now,
this, I'll admit, makes it sound as though I've a vendetta against
everyone's favourite red-headed clan, but I've not. I like the
Weasleys. Sod it, I like Fred. I'm talking about storytelling. From
book four onwards, Harry Potter is filled with a cast of likeable,
entertaining supporting characters who are murdered in the gradually
escalating bloodbath that culminates in the battle for Hogwarts. Not
Harry though. Not Ron, or Hermione or Hagrid. Not even Ginny, or
Neville or Dean. No, it's Cedric, Sirius, Dumbledore, Dobby, Tonks,
Lupin, Fred - everyone
outside our enchanted little circle of main characters and their
immediate friends. Flat-pack tragedy. Kill the spare.
If you
had asked me who my favourite, favourite writer
was when I was twelve years old, my response would have been without
hesitation. Robin Jarvis. No, he's not as good a writer as Garner,
nor as clever as Pullman, but he taught me one very valuable thing
about storytelling.
Don't
kill the spare.
No,
wait, scrap that. Don't just kill
the spare.
For
those of you who aren't acquainted with Jarvis' work and doubt the
veracity of this statement, Jarvis' best known series can be
summarised thus: a faintly mythic bloodbath inhabited by
anthropomorphic animals.
You
got a favourite character? It's dead4.
A favourite place? Razed. A favourite people? Massacred. There was a
kind of glee in it, murder, murder, murder, mayhem, black magic and
death. No, Jarvis wasn't killing his darlings, dear, he was killing
yours. Of course, it
wouldn't have worked if it had just been unremitting blackness5
- he played the heartstrings, but not too much. He pulled no punches.
Sometimes,
though, he pulled something else, though: a fast one.
Which
brings me onto our next point. Fast ones are great. I love fast ones.
The end of The Whitby Series is
one hell of a fast one. In fact, it's a whole sequence of fast ones.
The Alchemist's Cat is
still, to my mind, one of the best fast ones ever pulled. And
sometimes the fast one is the way out – don't just kill the spare,
kill the darling. Then bring them back.
They're
great, fast ones. Every now and then they do stop something turning
into an outright rout. They bring a little bit of lightness, of joy
back to your reader's world. They promise to drive the nail in, to
make the incision, only to pull back at the last minute. It's okay,
chaps. Everything will be just peachy.
Which
is all well and good, but they undermine what I see to be the first
rule of storytelling. Don't try to please
your
reader. You are not a little child, trying to persuade a strict
caregiver to provide sweets. You do not need to pander to their
little whims. You are a writer,
FFS.
Within the little confines of your book, your world, your script,
your whatever, you are GOD, and you do not need to be a nice one.
When you pull a fast one, your readers should feel nothing other than
sheer, bleeding relief. “Thank fuck,” should be what they are
whispering to themselves. “I care. I care. I care.” And to get
that reaction, you cannot pull them all the time6.
That's
the thing about fast ones. They are throwing your reader the sponge,
giving them the sticking plaster. They are kissing them, making it
all better. If you always do it, bring your character to the edge of
jeopardy, and pull them back at the last minute, your readers won't
believe harm can really come to them. Your readers will slip inside a
cosy little fantasy where everything will be okay. You stop being a
cruel and implacable God and become a parent – scooping your reader
up before they get to where the real darkness lives.
Don't
do this. Do not get sentimental, do not make the red jerseys. Simply
kill! Kill! KILL!
Ahem.
Sorry.
Which
brings me to Susan Hill. She knows what its like, the punches are the
things that she does not pull. I was never expecting any tenderness.
About five chapters into The
Various Haunts of Men I
said to myself, “If she does not kill Character X, I am going to be
so disappointed.” Character X was charming, lovable, even.
Character X was engaging, sympathetic, central. Character X was not
the spare.
By
the end of the novel, I was begging for her to pull a fast one. Let X
off, I prayed, just this once.
But
she did not.
And
I nearly cried.
Now
that, my fine friends, is excellent storytelling.
1Branagh's
Love's Labours Lost being a
case in point.
2Not
so much that she killed him, more that she couldn't think of
anything else to do with him first.
3
Would anyone even have noticed had
it been George?
4Except
in the rare instance where it is the traitor who causes everyone
else's death. But there you go.
5Although
I'm not saying he wasn't prepared to give that a try.
6I'm
looking at you, Steven Moffat.
