A Writer's Tale (16 page)

I can see only two realistic possibilities for our scenario.

One, Spike is using an automatic and it gets jammed. This sort of “Thing does happen. A round sometimes doesn’t get fed into the chamber properly, and the gun won’t fire. In that case, you may have a difficult time prying out the stuck round.

Two, Spike doesn’t
have
ammo.

If I want to save my gimmick, I need to choose between those two alternatives.

The jam has potential. Maybe Susan could offer to let Spike use her eyebrow tweezers to clear the jam.

Nah. I don’t care for it. The jam is a little too forced and complicated.

Whereas the other alternative has a wealth of possibilities.

He has no ammo!

Why the hell not?

Now we really have a story cooking.

Obviously, Spike
thinks
he has ammo. Otherwise, why did he try to shoot the clerk?

If he thinks he has ammo but he doesn’t,
where is it?

I have no idea.

But I’ve got to figure it out. If I can come up with a good reason for his gun being empty, I’ve probably got a story.

The ammo might be missing because someone interfered with it.

Susan?

How could Susan, without Spike’s knowledge, get her hands on his weapon and unload it?

Maybe she’s a magician.

I don’t think so.

Maybe she’s a pickpocket.

Better. But it still seems to push the boundaries of credibility a little bit too far.

While thinking about these matters, another thought has been running through the back of my mind: maybe Spike’s
wife
unloaded his gun without his knowledge back home before he took off for work.” Why would she unload it? Maybe she knows he’s a robber, and she takes out the ammo so he won’t hurt anyone. Or maybe she hates him and wants him to get killed. Or maybe she’s overprotective of him, unloaded the weapon so that she could clean his fingerprints off the cartridges, but then neglected to reload it after “helping” him. Any such situation might be the basis for a very interesting short story.

While fooling with those possibilities, however, an idea suddenly exploded into my head.

What if Susan, the-store customer, is Spike’s wife?

This could work.

In fact, I feel sure that it will.

A little tricky to pull off, but most stories are.

Naturally, the story has to be written in such a way that Susan appears to be a complete stranger to the criminal. She seems to be an innocent bystander, so the readers worry about what the awful robber might do to her. Things start looking very dicey for Susan when the Spike tries to shoot the store clerk. But the handgun doesn’t fire.

We’ve already decided that it doesn’t fire because, for some reason, it isn’t loaded.

At this point, the “natural structure” of-the story allows us another simple choice.

Who
unloaded the gun? Spike or Susan?

Given the decisions we’ve already made, it has to be one or the other.

Unless they have a kid.

I don’t like the idea of their child unloading the gun. It seems too forced.

But the
notion
of their child’s involvement in the situation triggers another idea.

Even though Spike is a criminal, he’s a good parent. (Chortle chortle.) Far be it from Spike, an armed robber, to-leave a loaded firearm around the house where his child might play with it and have an accident!

No, he always unloads his gun and keeps the ammo hidden safely away from the kid.

Let’s make the gun a revolver, not an automatic. Spike would be less likely to notice empty cylinders than a big gap up the handle of his weapon.

This morning, Spike ran off “to work” without remembering to retrieve his revolver’s cartridges from their usual hiding place. His adoring wife, Susan, noticed his oversight.

By then, however, Spike was already out the door. So she went chasing him in her own car. Because of his head start, she is unable to overtake him until he is already inside the store and in the process of robbing it.

Susan needs to enter the store
after
Spike has started robbing it.

She enters just in time to see him try to shoot the clerk.

But his gun doesn’t work.

In the original concept, the idea was for Susan to say, “Let me see your gun. Maybe I can fix it for you.” Or something to that effect.

As the story has developed to this point, however, that wouldn’t work.

Susan has brought the ammo to Spike in much the same spirit that a wife might chase down a husband who left for work without his wallet or sack lunch. But this is more serious. She certainly doesn’t want him to get killed for lack of his ammunition.

Just as she enters the store, however, she sees him try to shoot the clerk in cold blood.

And she is shocked.

Suddenly, she doesn’t want to give him the ammo.

But Spike knows she has it. The moment his gun doesn’t fire, he realizes that he forgot to load it before leaving the house. There can be only one reason for Susan showing up: she followed him from home to bring him the ammunition.

Now, he wants it.

But she won’t hand it over.

And the nature of the story has changed dramatically since we first started toying with it.

I sort of hate to leave behind the nifty, tricky little tale that we seemed to be developing at the start of all this.

If I’d stuck with it and pulled it off, it could’ve been a nice story of the kind that appear so often in mystery magazines.

Light, superficial, amusing, not very realistic.

But that story is gone.

Suddenly, we’ve uncovered a potential for a crime story with some real depth. There might still be humor in the interchanges between Susan and Spike (with the clerk for an audience), but there is a heaviness, a grimness, an opportunity to get very realistic.

Susan loves Spike, wants to help him, but doesn’t want him to murder the clerk and therefore doesn’t want to hand over the ammo. Spike
must
have the ammo. The clerk is a witness and has to die.

“I’ve gotta have that ammo, Sue!”

“So you can blow that poor man’s head off?”

It might go beyond words. He might attack Sue in hopes of getting his hands on the ammo.

As they try to resolve their problem, time is going by.

More customers might enter the store.

The clerk might try to make a break.

Cops might show up.

Anything
might happen.

They’ve got to resolve their conflicts and hit the road before something hits the fan.

I suddenly see a possible wind-up. Remember their kid? Remember how they’re such good parents? Well, Susan wouldn’t rush off in the car and leave the kid home alone, would she?

She brought him along.

He’s out in the car, waiting.

But maybe he gets tired of waiting, and comes in to see what’s taking so long.

Maybe the clerk grabs the kid to use as a shield.

Susan’s kid.

You don’t screw with HER KID!

She tosses a bullet to Spike. He catches it, feeds it into the revolver and strides toward the clerk, pulling the trigger until the round makes its way to the cylinder…

And Spike puts a bullet through the clerk’s head.

And we have ourselves a story.

There is, however, one problem that should be dealt with.

Why
didn’t Spike load his gun before leaving the house?

The answer to that question could change the entire story.

For instance, maybe he forgot to grab the ammo because he’d had a serious fight with Susan, that morning. Or maybe he or Susan had set down something in front of the cartridges a gift so that he simply didn’t see them and left them behind. Or maybe somebody else took them
out
of his gun for whatever reason.

The possibilities are almost endless.

But dealing with any of them would change the story drastically.

Let’s say that we don’t
want
to take the story into a completely new direction by dwelling on the story behind Spike walking out of the house without his ammo.

Simple.

It would be possible to ignore the issue. Just state it as a simple fact: he left his ammo home. Woops. These things happen. And these things
do
happen in real life. I enjoy allowing certain story elements to go unexplained sometimes.

Makes for realism. Crap happens.

However, some readers aren’t happy with that sort of thing.

They want every aspect to be nicely explained. They’ve come to expect it from reading mediocre books and watching movies and TV shows written by the numbers.

So, let’s give them a neat, logical explanation for Spike walking out of the house with his ammo.

One that won’t intrude on the story.

Last night, Spike and Susan celebrated their anniversary.

Spike got looped. The next morning, when he staggers out of bed and goes to work, he’s suffering from a terrible hangover. He can hardly think straight, so he forgets his ammunition.

The hangover not only provides a simple explanation for the ammo oversight, but also gives us some insight into Spike’s character and into his relationship with Susan. It might even give readers the idea that he doesn’t
always
go around trying to shoot store clerks.

It’s just that today he has this
horrible hangover.
He’s not “himself.”

And so it goes.

“Stick Up” started out in one direction, and ended up somewhere unexpected.

In the old days, when writing for magazines such as
Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock
and
Mike Shayne,
I would have kept the story simple and light. I probably would’ve ended it with a surprise such as Susan tossing ammo to Spike and saying, “I swear, you’d forget your head if it weren’t attached.” Period.

But that was in the old days.

Ever since I stopped writing for the mystery magazines, I’ve been “going for it.” I’ve felt completely free to do the stories my way.

This is now
exactly
the sort of story I would write if asked to contribute a crime story to an anthology. If I should write it as I’ve described it here, I’m sure it would be purchased and published.

Maybe I’ll give it a whirl.

My 28 Favorite Short Stories/Novellas

1. “The Big Two-Hearted River” - Ernest Hemingway

2. “The Black Cat” - Edgar Allan Poe

3. “The Body” - Stephen King

4. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” - Ernest Hemingway

5. “The Color Out of Space” - H.P. Lovecraft

6. “The Deep End” - Robert R. McCammon

7. “The Dunwich Horror” - H.P. Lovecraft

8. “The Fall of the House of Usher” - Edgar Allan Poe

9. “Iverson’s Pits” - Dan Simmons

10. “Lamb to the Slaughter” - Roald Dahl

11. “The Man from the South” - Roald Dahl

12. “The Mist” - Stephen King

13. “The Monkey’s Paw” - W.W. Jacobs

14. “Night They Missed the Horror Show” - Joe Lansdale

15. “One of the Missing” - Ambrose Bierce

16. “The Open Window” - Saki

17. “The Raft” - Stephen King

18. “Skin” - Roald Dahl

19. “The Squaw” - Bram Stoker

20. “The Tell-Tale Heart” - Edgar Allan Poe

21. “Ten Indians” - Ernest Hemingway

22.
 “To Build a Fire” - Jack London

23. “Traps” - F. Paul Wilson

24. “The Ugly File” - Ed Gorman

25. “Up in Michigan” - Ernest Hemingway

26. “The Voice in the Night” - William Hope Hodgson

27. “The Wendigo” - Algernon Blackwood

28. “The Willows” - Algernon Blackwood

On High Concepts

HIGH CONCEPTS FOR NOVELS ARE HIGHLY OVERRATED.

But what are they?

A high concept is a
brilliant, earth shaking story gimmick that’ll guarantee you a huge advance from your publisher, big publicity, a sure bestseller, and the sale of film rights to a major studio.

A lot of writers beat their brains out looking for a high concept. I’ve done it myself.

Generally, this results in little more than sore brains.

I know of writers who “test” ideas. They’ll try out their concepts on friends, fellow writers, their agents or their editors, asking basically, “What about this one? Is
this
a high concept (alternately known as a ‘breakout idea’) or should I keep on looking?”

Some agents and editors might even request a selection of concepts from you, so
they
can have the pleasure of picking out the topic for your next book.

(If they do, you’re in trouble.)

Now, I’m not a-gonna say there’s no point in looking for high concepts.

They can’t hurt.

You’re certainly better off writing a novel with a terrific gimmick than one that has a mediocre gimmick or no gimmick at all. That stands to reason.

But a high concept is no guarantee of success.

A lot will depend on how well and in what directions you develop the concept. If you take it in a direction that your editor doesn’t appreciate, you’re sunk.

If you are serious about taking the “high concept” route, you really need to second-guess your editor and try to figure out how he would like see it developed. Try to read your editor’s mind. Ask questions. Write the book to order.

If you do that, of course, you are a hack.

If you’re going to be any good, you need to do it your way and take your chances that other people (including an editor) will appreciate what you’ve done with your story.

I’ve written several novels that, at least in my opinion, have high concepts.
The Stake, Savage, Quake and Body Rides,
for instance. In my opinion, if treated properly by publishers, every one of them had the potential to be a bestseller. They pretty much
did
live up to my hopes for them in the U.K., but not here in the U.S.

Why
did none of them become bestsellers here in the States?