keep it small (but not too small): part two

As I mentioned in my last post, I once tried to write a book with sweep, with larger-than-life heroic characters who did no wrong, and it was a trainwreck. 

A Summer of War is a novel centered on a young journalist intent on sniffing out the forgotten stories of the Vietnam War. The protagonist, Chris McKenna, does not lack vision or confidence, but even she knows the folly of trying to tell the story of the entire Vietnam War. 

You know who didn’t know that, at least not at first? Her creator. Yes, at the time, twenty-something-year-old me, an older millennial, thought she could tell the story of that war, a war that ended years before her birth, in her very first novel. Like her protagonist, that me didn’t lack confidence either, but something was definitely off with her vision. 

The first draft was awful. The several hundred that followed weren’t so good, either. I set the book aside for a solid decade or so as I entered the real world, started a career, focused on life. But that story kept calling to me. 

Finally, I saw the solution to my (biggest) problem: I had to make it smaller. Much smaller. 

So I listened to the characters. Chris knew that trying to tell the story of the war was both impossible and too big, rendering it meaningless. But the story of one platoon over the course of one summer in one little slice of the country during the height of the war? That’s doable. And, more importantly, meaningful. 

War is, at its core, conflict. (Duh, you’re thinking.) But not just conflict between armed combatants. It’s also conflict between strategies and tactics, means and ends, and the little angel and devil perched on each shoulder. Belief systems are challenged, and sometimes changed. People are challenged, and often changed. Stick a scrappy journalist into the middle of that mess and you have a story that’s big enough to matter, yet small enough to fit in that Kindle of yours. 

This was a critical lesson I took with me into my next set of adventures, The Sandstorm Series. Kate and Nick and their motley crew of friends won’t save the world; they know that, and I’ve matured enough as a writer to know that, too. But they will play their little part in something big. 

In every Sandstorm adventure, the characters drive the plot. The characters know what falls within the bounds of reality and they know what they’re capable of doing. I learned early to turn control over to them.  

Their personalities shine through in every book, and every story proceeds in accordance with those personalities. It’s one thing for a spy to create a terrorist in the name of protecting America; it’s quite another for that spy to realize she’s lost control of that terrorist to the very forces she was trying to combat. Most fictional spies, stereotypically ice-cold and incapable of normal human emotion, would cut their losses, chalk up the terrorist as too far gone to be saved, and maybe indulge in drink to drown the sorrows they swear they don’t feel. But not Kate Devlin, because that’s simply not who she is. The accidental terrorist is not a real threat to America, but he is a threat to himself and people she’s grown to love. 

Kate’s evolution as a person and an intelligence officer is key to the series. She’s the linchpin holding it all together, but she has to recognize her own wants and needs. Does she still want to be a spy after her mishap with that accidental terrorist? What if she joins Sandstorm International with the man whose life she nearly cost? Can two stubborn Type-A personalities coexist in love and business partnership? 

At its core, the Sandstorm Series is really about two people who love each other and the family they find along the way. Sure, they wreak havoc against terrorists wherever they go, and their adventures are not for the faint of heart. But ultimately, plot is secondary to fully realized people in both partnership and conflict with other fully realized people. Even terrorists. 

Had I repeated my mistake with A Summer of War, Kate and her friends would make valiant but stalled-at-page-200 efforts to save all the people and defeat all the terrorists. Instead, they do what they can from where they are, and they make mistakes along the way. 

In an alternate universe, one that a writer is certainly entitled to create, maybe my characters would defeat all the terrorists, save all the people, tell the whole story of a long and brutal war. But then they would be caricatures, not characters with faults and follies and foibles. You know, they wouldn’t be people. 

Give me a story about real people, real people playing their small part in something big, and I’m hooked. That’s a story that fits perfectly into my Kindle.