If you are like me, you don’t like
dwelling on dark subjects. We get enough of that in the daily news. But I do
enjoy writing and reading thrillers and high-action romantic suspense stories. However,
such stories usually require something bad to happen or to become an imminent
threat. When I plan a novel I often choose a prevalent evil in our society, one
that I want to expose, to serve as the malevolent factor in the story. But how
does one treat, or expose, a horrid evil without creating a dark story?
Scriptures teach us that God,
His goodness, and His word are light, and that Jesus is the light of the world.
We know that darkness is the absence of light. So, to avoid a dark story, we
simply infuse it with light. But how does that work in a novel dealing with a
dark subject like child trafficking? I’m going to use my recent release, On the Pineapple Express, to illustrate
my approach.
When plotting a novel, authors
have a lot of freedom in how they tell their story. I chose to keep the ugly
events offstage or to make them imminent, threatening to happen any moment,
rather than graphically portray them. The darkest part of human trafficking is
sexual abuse. In my story, I structured the plot so the reader knew such abuse
would not happen until the group of captive girls was sold. Then I started a
clock ticking toward the scheduled sale. This raised the level of suspense
while giving me a way to avoid placing graphic evil images in my readers’ minds
… as long as my protagonists are successful.
A second thing I did to keep the
story from becoming dark is, at the darkest moments, I inserted hope by
inserting, through my heroine, God’s promises and some things about God’s
character, including His heart for the oppressed. I’m not sure who originally
said this because so many people have repeated it, but it’s been noted that people
can live for quite a while without many things, but not for more than a second
without hope. In utter hopelessness, we die.
Dark clouds can eclipse sunlight,
completely. My wife and I once saw it grow pitch dark at noon in San Antonio under
a 50,000-foot-high super cell. When the 3” hailstones began to fall in the
darkness it was frightening, but we knew that, above the storm, the sun was
shining, and we had the sure hope that the sun would return. Sure enough, in
another hour, it was again a bright, sunny Texas day. Don’t let your
characters, thus your readers, spend too much time underneath that cloud.
To sum it all up, infuse your
story with light. When the story must grow darker, infuse the situation with
hope. Substitute the threat of the vile thing for graphic images of it. And
remember that, in the end, light must win. Goodness and justice must prevail,
defeating the darkness. My heroine summed this up by saying, “My role became
clear, woven into the tapestry of a story only a good God could write.” I
believe that’s where all of us, readers and writers, want our stories to end.
Treating child trafficking in
this way, I have no reservations about giving On the Pineapple Express to
Bio:
H. L. Wegley served in the USAF as an Intelligence Analyst
and a Weather Officer. In civilian life, he was a weather forecaster and a
research scientist in atmospheric physics. After earning an MS in Computer
Science, he developed computing systems for Boeing before retiring in the
Seattle area, where he and his wife of 47 years enjoy small-group ministry,
grandchildren, hiking Olympic Peninsula beaches, snorkeling Maui whenever they
can, and where he writes inspirational thrillers and romantic-suspense novels.
Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hlw154th
On the Pineapple Express: http://amzn.to/1bZxiJ4
Blog: The Weather Scribe
On the Pineapple Express:
In one of the most beautiful places on earth the
ugliest of crimes holds young, innocent lives in its evil grip. An intercepted
cell-phone call from a remote area on the Olympic Peninsula tells beautiful,
brilliant NSA researcher, Jennifer Akihara, a group of girls will soon be sold
into slavery by human traffickers. She enlists her fiancé, Lee Brandt, to help
find the holding location and convince the FBI to intervene. With the clock
ticking off the last few hours before both the sale of the girls and the
arrival of a deadly storm, and with international criminals pursuing them, can
Jennifer and Lee save the girls, or will their wedding plans be cancelled ...
permanently?
Don't forget to stop by tomorrow, when you can enter to win a free copy!
No comments:
Post a Comment