The Last Place I Looked

by Hannah

This morning the house was in an uproar. My son lost his hermit crab, a tree crab with a metallic green shell that wandered away yesterday as my son played guitar, and that he forgot (which is rare) once it was out of sight. We ripped the house apart this morning at six, when he should have been catching his last bits of sleep and I exercising; at least for some reason he remembered.

When my daughter came down, she asked where we'd looked. Everywhere, we said, starting with the dining room where it was last seen, with the two farthest rooms the least searched: my son's bedroom and the office. She disappeared down the hall and a minute later said, "Found him!" "Where?" "In the paper towel tube on the bedroom desk that says Krabby's Tube." Which, of course, is where the crab really was left; luckily the critter didn't get it in his little head to venture past it.

This relates to fiction how, you ask? Well, like this:

When a story isn't working, the most frustrating thing is to find out where that element went. After all, everything was in your head at some point, wasn't it? What didn't make it out? You check in with all the characters, you re-examine setting, you add stakes, you firm up the voice. Still, not quite.

Then one day you find out that you didn't really look everywhere, or perhaps not as carefully as you thought you did. I, for example, needed to up the stakes after the last round of reading, which as I've said before, was fine with me. The challenge was to add more and yet wrap it all tighter. I knew what I wanted to add, but hadn't known before how to weave it in more fully, and thus had left it out.

One of my characters finally whopped me upside the head. Not my main character, mind you, who has been trying to present himself as sympathetic despite a raffish streak. No, a relative of his gave me a Look and said, "Don't you know him well enough by now? He's a game player. Think hard on that, dear." Funny how in a book in part about games, I'd worked it out on one level, then two, but what it really needed was yet another, third level of interplay.

She was right, of course. (Funny, because she is the character I trust the most within the story.) My main man had been less than forthcoming, as had another character, in fact. And after examining that last dark spot more carefully, I pulled out pieces that fit together and fit into the whole of the story. So next time I find myself with a dilemma like this, I'll know better. You rarely have to go outside and bring in new things. The need is to recheck, carefully, all the corners. Don't skip even the most obvious places, the ones labelled with big block letters in Sharpie marker: Krabby's Tube. Game Players. The last place you look is, of course, always right in front of you to start.