Try This: Write a Suicide Note
NOT Your Own, Please
Despite This Being a World Where Writers Are Paid by the Word
Keep writing shorter. Make your plot point happen and move forward. In the short term this skill will not make you rich, but your reader will thank you, especially after having read so much wordy stuff based on the 19th-century paid-by-the-word model of writing fiction. Once you’ve built your readership — the people who appreciate your lean, dynamic story lines, the film people who appreciate that you can move the plot along — then you can write War and Peace.
With that in mind, how do we hack straight into depicting a character’s motives/resentments/regrets? A suicide note. Maybe don’t put the note up front in the story/book, but you can use it as a device to overtly state the things you’ve depicted to date in the story. Thus, you can revisit and summarize events that came before, and you can bring your slower readers up to speed.
Then… don’t kill the character. The suicide note is a smart way for the character to face and state his/her shortcomings — and then eventually overcome them.
Such a note is similar to a character speaking/writing about themself in the third person. Think of Marla Singer in Fight Club as she tells the paramedics, “That girl used to be a lovely charming person, but she’s lost faith in herself…”
A suicide note allows a character to be brutally frank about his/her failings. But the flipside of this pain is how the note allows the character to reconnect with what he/she really wanted in life, and to recommit and achieve those goals. For example: “I’ve never done anything truly heroic in my life.” Then, you depict the character doing something heroic. It’s a weird, easy set-up and pay-off. And it works beautifully.
A suicide note is that “Pit of Despair” that introduces the nature of the eventual victory. What’s more, you can get specific: Write the note in the setting for the planned suicide, have the poison at hand, the loaded gun, the tank of helium. Maybe that gun/poison eventually is put to use in the heroic act. Voila, you’ve already introduced it!
No, I’m not being glib about suicide. My family is rife with suicides. But the depth of despair gives your character a window into what he/she expected from life and from themself. And the note helps you really get inside the character’s psyche. Again, such notes are terse, so they demonstrate what Gordon Lish called “ruthless exclusion.” Suicide notes are Lean, and we love lean.
To repeat, such a note shouldn’t fall too early in the book/story. No reader wants to enter into a depressing story. But placed in the right spot the note will summarize events to date, express internal motivations, and set up the victory you’ve got planned. Also consider that a potential suicide writes in broad strokes. Like the newsreel summation at the beginning of Citizen Kane such a note would allow you to sketch out the opening of a story. Or to close the end of one. While hitting the high points — to repeat — which your slower readers might not have already caught.
Now forget I ever mentioned this strategy. It will pop up in your writing at the moment you need it, and you will think that YOU invented it.
Shout out to Karin Kohlmeier in NYC for publication. Big Congratulations.
I’ve unpublished my post from last week. The project is secret for now, but just until the writers guidlines are crafted. The news blew up too fast, so we can’t discuss it. It’s the big Top Secret book about the Secret Thing, but wheels are turning so get cracking on your secret submissions. And the secret fees to be paid look very good, just don’t talk about any of this to anyone. And you didn’t hear about any of this from me. Shhhhhhh….
Thanks for the shout out, Chuck! You made my day.
Yay, Karin!!!