But instead of God demanding Abraham prove his love by stabbing Isaac with a knife, it’s a distraught mom pressuring a dad to stick their kid with a needle.
It’s similar to using cultural precedent to move the reader from the known to the unknown, but somehow deeper.
If you can identify the core legend that your story is telling, you can best fulfill the expectation of the legend’s ending. Authority: Get Something Wrong
Among the easiest ways to gain the reader’s trust is to get something wrong.
To my way of thinking, there are two forms of authority. The first I call “head authority,” where the writer demonstrates a wisdom or knowledge beyond the reader’s. This can be something basic and earthy, like the passages in The Grapes of Wrath where characters use thin brass wire to compress piston rings while reassembling an engine. Or something less savory, like the mother in my book Choke who switches the largely identical bottles between boxes of hair dye, knowing the buyers will get hair some color they never expected. Head authority is based on knowledge, used for evil or otherwise.
The second type of authority is “heart authority,” gained when a character tells an emotional truth or commits an act that shows great vulnerability. The character shows an emotional wisdom and bravery despite enormous pain. Often it involves killing an animal, such as the scene in my book Rant where a character must kill his pug dog when it manifests full rabies. Or the scene in Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete where the narrator must kill an aged, crippled racehorse. In the Denis Johnson short story “Dirty Wedding,” the narrator is waiting while his girlfriend undergoes an abortion. A nurse approaches to say the girlfriend, Michelle, is fine. The narrator asks, “Is she dead?”
Stunned, the nurse says, “No.”
To which the narrator responds, “I kind of wish she was.”
At that the reader is stunned, but “heart authority” is created. We know the writer isn’t afraid to tell an awful truth. The writer might not be smarter than us. But the writer is braver and more honest. That’s “heart authority.”
This occurs in my story “Romance” as the girlfriend’s behavior becomes more and more erratic, and the narrator is forced into such denial that he must reject his friends and family. “…and after all that there’s a lot less people at our wedding than you might think.”
Emotional authority also comes through doing something horrible but necessary for a noble reason. It’s the main character, Rynn, in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane who is forced to kill those who want to molest her. Or it’s Dolores Claiborne in Stephen King’s book of the same name, who tries to kill her suffering, suicidal employer.
A character’s mistake or misdeeds allow the reader to feel smarter. The reader becomes the caretaker or parent of the character and wants the character to survive and succeed.
Another way to create heart authority is to depict a character talking about herself in the third person. Think of the scene in Fight Club where paramedics are arriving to rescue a suicidal Marla Singer. As she’s fleeing the scene, she tells her would-be saviors not to bother and calls herself irredeemable infectious human waste. In the play Suddenly, Last Summer the character Catherine Holly says, “Suddenly, last winter I began to write my diary in the third person…” In either case, the shift to third person implies self-loathing or disassociation or both.
So if you were my student, I’d tell you to establish emotional authority by depicting an imperfect character making a mistake.
A Postcard from the Tour
The arms started because of the tattoos. The ones the readers got. During my first book tours people would ask me, and I’d autograph their arms or legs. A year later we’d meet again. Another book, another tour, and they’d show me my signature made permanent in their skin.
My solution? To order wholesale. Arms, legs, hands, feet. By the cardboard caseload from slave labor factories in China. By the shipping container, in time. Gross after gross, if you’ll forgive the pun. These are realistic, fake severed arms with gelatinous red blood and a yellowed stump of shattered bone where you’d expect. Jaundiced skin. In my Toyota Tacoma pickup I’d haul them home from the post office, a longish drive out twisting, two-lane Highway 14 through the woods. The one time, my first trip, I didn’t think to tie down the stacked boxes. Two miles shy of my driveway a box disappeared from the rearview mirror, then another was gone. Where I could pull over, I looked back to the busted-open cardboard. The highway littered with bloody limbs. Cars and trucks backed up to the horizon. Nobody honking, they’re so stunned to see me dashing around, throwing gory arms and legs onto the road’s shoulder.
One log truck driver, the last vehicle to slowly crawl past once I’d cleared a path, looked down from his cab window and said, “You lost your first box three miles ago.”
Most I found. A few I no doubt threw too far, their pink fingers and toes still hiding among the ferns, waiting for a hiker to discover.
Not intentional, but nothing to joke about, not in those woods where the Green River Killer and the Forest Park Killer had stashed their victims.
The bulk of limbs I’d gotten home where I sat on the porch and autographed them in the sun with a fat Marks-A-Lot pen. Nothing you’d want to breathe, indoors, hour after hour, neither the smelly rubber arms nor the pen.
Then off to the UPS Store they’d go, addressed to every bookstore on my next tour. So onstage at the end of each event I could call the bookstore staff up for a round of applause. Always following the applause with the same closing line, “Since you’ve given us such a big hand, we’d like to return the favor…”
Then the shared gasp of hundreds of people as we’d
