In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the inmates of the asylum go deep-sea fishing accompanied by two prostitutes. When they return, Billy Bibbit has sex with one and kills himself, triggering the chaos of the third act.
In my own book Fight Club the narrator goes into the world to hunt for Tyler Durden, only to discover that he himself is Durden. This truth triggers the suicide/murder.
So once you’ve established your characters and settings, give your people a glimpse of the outside world. It’s based on Heidegger, sort of, and his idea that escaping from your Dasein or destiny is pointless. The larger world reminds characters of their smallness and mortality, and it prompts them to take disastrous action. Think of the final flashback reveal in Suddenly, Last Summer. Sebastian finally takes action, but he’s already doomed.
Perhaps this is why people dream of traveling a lot at retirement. Seeing the world and recognizing one’s own insignificance makes it okay to come home and to die. Tension: Relief as Humor or Joy
If you were my student I’d tell you a joke. I’d ask, “What do you call a black man who flies a plane?”
As the answer, I’d shout, “A pilot, you fucking racist!”
What we think of as humor comes from the rapid relief of tension. First you think I’m going to say something hateful. And then I don’t. In fact I reverse the accusation and throw it back at you. A classic power reversal.
A laugh or merely a happy ending occurs when you negate tension. The more tension you can create, and the longer you can sustain it without alienating your reader, the more satisfying the ending will seem. And even if you do alienate the reader, there’s a good chance he’ll return to the book out of unresolved curiosity. In 1996 when Fight Club was first launched, many book reviewers reported that they’d stopped reading at some point and had thrown the book against a wall—literally—but soon sought it out to see how it would resolve. Tension: Explore the Un-Decidable
There is enormous tension in unresolved social issues. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida proposed that Western culture is binary. Things must be one way or the other. True or false. Alive or dead. Male or female. Anything that doesn’t fall clearly into one category or another drives us to distraction. His favorite example was the zombie, which seems to be both dead and alive. As does the vampire. And in stories about either, the goal is to resolve them as dead.
This is the reason I depict questionable behavior in my work but refuse to endorse or condemn it. Why preclude the wonderful energy of public debate?
Often readers respond strongly without grasping why. Film historians speculate that Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera became hits because they allowed viewers an approved way to react to the lingering horror of World War I. Advances in medicine saved the lives of many soldiers who never would’ve come home from earlier wars. And these severely mutilated survivors occasionally appeared in public. These horror films gave audiences a scare, but they also allowed them to acclimate to the sight of “monsters.”
Likewise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is said to have given readers an approved way to exhaust their fears about wealthy Jews who were emigrating to London in the nineteenth century. Rosemary’s Baby safely pointed out how little control women had over their reproductive health at the time of its release. By couching his story as “horror,” Ira Levin made it less threatening, less real.
With that in mind, consider other aspects of the culture that aren’t clearly resolved. To me, what first comes to mind is abortion and male circumcision. People will fight forever to defend or denounce them. As a writer your job isn’t to resolve an issue, but you can depict the situation and make use of the natural tension a topic carries.
As a writing prompt, consider a story about a man who wants his wife to have an abortion. She agrees, but only if he agrees to be circumcised. She’ll give up a child if he’ll give up a certain amount of himself, and quite likely some of his sexual pleasure. He won’t have to raise another child. She won’t have to bother with the floppy, droopy flap of male skin that’s never quite as fresh smelling as she might like.
As another writing prompt, consider the canned meat Spam. The writer Doug Coupland tells me that anthropologists have a theory as to why the canned meat is so popular among Pacific Islanders. They speculate that Spam has a taste and consistency close to that of human flesh, and cultures with a distant history of cannibalism crave the product without realizing why. So…a secret dining club hosts ocean cruises where guests are taken miles offshore, into international waters, and pay a huge fee for a banquet of human flesh. The truth is the hosts actually prepare and serve Spam. Is it ethical to charge people—icky people, granted—an exorbitant fee for fake human flesh?
A final writing prompt: You’re a college professor in physics or chemistry, and your most promising student comes to you with a discovery. She’s found a new molecular property in chocolate. She’s brilliant and naive, but you realize that her discovery could eventually be used to arm the most destructive bomb humankind has ever known. If she’s allowed to publish her findings, sooner or later billions
