Story of a Story: My Last Confession

A space odyssey

A few years ago, I was reading an article about the Coen brothers, of The Big Lebowski, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, etc fame. I love their movies and the way their stories brings out the darkness in each of its characters. One of the things in the article that stood out was them describing their basic approach to storytelling: Get a bunch of broken characters into a scene, put a pile of money in the middle of them, and follow what happens.

This use of including one simple thing to bring out a group’s worst behavior is a favorite of mine, and it was the idea behind my short story “My Last Confession.” I actually started writing this story all the way back in college (early days, early days). Although I hadn’t worked out the details of it all, I knew I wanted to tell a story about a doomed spaceship that brings out the worst in the passengers. And I wanted it to explode.

When I originally wrote it, the main character, a famous politician, got on to ride the space bus with the commoners on a routine commute back to Mars. As it became apparent that the space bus was falling apart, each of them started getting frantic, the politician betraying his true character and showing himself to be a hypocritical, self-important fraud before the whole thing exploded.

When I finished, I could tell that something wasn’t working. There was a menacing setting and the characters being confronted with their own mortality, all good fodder for story, but there was no pile of money. There was no bomb with a button, like in The Dark Knight. The story lacked the particular thing that drove the central conflict.

I showed the story to a good friend of mine and fellow writer, Matt Graham, and he suggested adding a hatch. It was brilliance and it completely opened up the story and taught me an important lesson in writing.

Setting, inevitability, and context is not enough to create the essential tension of a conflict. You need a body, a gun, a pile of money, an escape hatch that can only accommodate a few. You need that one simple thing that disrupts the status quo and foils the characters intent.

I rewrote it with an escape hatch, sat on it for 15 years and then re-worked it. This was my second short story that actually got picked up by a “literary” journal and published. Th publication may be borderline spam, and I probably should have held out for something better. But published is published, and I was so excited to have some progress.

Without further ado, you can read the entirety of the story here.

Have you struggled with creating tension in your story? What is your favorite “pile of money” device in a story you’ve either written or read?