In praise of velociraptors

Or, musing on killer dinosaurs and killer fiction. . .


Some friends and I subscribe to a certain principle in regard to the cinema: "There are few movies that can't be improved by the addition of some velociraptors."

Ditto, books. Ditto, blogs. Ditto, life.

When we've seen a movie we didn't like because it moved like moooolasssesss, we tell each other, "Coulda used a velociraptor."

If you need to know the literal meaning of "velociraptor," I pity you. No, no, just kidding. What I will do is direct you to the movie, "Jurassic Park." And I specifically direct you to the kitchen scene and to the scene of the big game hunter in the woods. "What a smart girl," he said to the velociraptor, before she ate him.

Every piece of art needs "tension." So does life, apparently. It's how fictional characters and our own characters get built. Some artists and real-life people can pull that off without resorting to dinosaurs. They can produce nail-biting tension between two people sitting at a kitchen table just looking at each other. Others of us need the fictional equivalent of velociraptors, or floods, or hurricanes, or dead bodies, or some other crises. We need them to shake things up, raise the stakes, and make the journey build to a satisfying payoff at the end. We need them to test abilities, courage, and yes, character, and to build more of same. Either that, or our characters get to endure those crises and see how well they can fail. And that, too is a matter of character, whether in books, movies, or life.

When it comes to my stories, I tend to find my own missing velociraptors during the rewrites. That's when I check each scene to see if it has conflict, action, tension, or if nothing really happens in it. And how can I tell if nothing has happened in a scene? By whether or not the emotions of the main character have changed to any degree from the beginning of the scene to the end. If she enters the kitchen feeling scared, but she exits it feeling terrified, something has definitely happened in those pages.

Fear not the velociraptor! Or, well, no, that would be stupid. Go ahead and fear the velociraptor, but just remember she has a peabrain and you have a greenbean brain, so you really ought to be able to out-strategize her. The problem, of course, is that she and her mate have been stalking people for a living, and you have probably not been escaping for a living. This is where the tension (and imagination) comes in, heh.

When we're writing, maybe we should say to ourselves: There's a velociraptor to the left of me! And to the right of me! Now I will try to keep that tension in my writing, maybe even without using dinosaurs.

Got any velociraptors facing you today? In the comments, I'll tell you about mine. Oh, and by the way, I promise I will talk about something besides writing sometimes! But when it calls, it calls. . .:)