Writing Tip #2: Kill Your Fairy Godmother

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Writing is the only career where it is completely legal, acceptable, and sometimes even encouraged to kill people that you love, to murder innocents with hopes, dreams, and weaknesses.  Some, like J.K. Rowling, cry when they have to pull the trigger (or brandish the wand, rather), but others find a strange, savage glee in banishing their beloved characters to the underworld.  When I urge you to kill off your fairy godmother, I’m not suggesting a short interlude with death (like Gandalf’s) or a happy, peaceful death (like Bilbo’s).  I’m talking brutal, violent, unexpected murder, wrenching the ground from underneath her and watching her plummet into the depths below.

 

Cinderella is a great story, yes, but how much more dramatic tension would there have been if this deus ex machina, this fairy godmother who flits in and solves a huge problem for the protagonist, was sent reeling off a cliff, leaving Cinderella to find her own way to the ball?  What if that glimmer of hope, beautiful and shimmering, was dashed against the rocks below?  Or, better yet, what if the fairy godmother’s gift came with a price?  Or what if she wasn’t really a godmother at all, but a villainess in disguise?  

 

When we read, we don’t want fairy godmothers.  We want the protagonist to claim their victory  on their own.  But we do so love it when the idea of the fairy godmother is there, an easy solution wrenched out of the character’s hands at the last moment.

 

Of course, “Fairy Godmother” doesn’t have to be a person.  It’s a representation of any plot device that offers that hope of an easy solution.  In Aladdin, for example, the titular character can solve all of his problems with the magic lamp: One wish and Voila!, Aladdin’s a prince!  It’s an easy solution, and for a time it seems to be exactly what Aladdin wants.  But that’s taken away when Jafar becomes a sorcerer and strips him of his noble title, along the way revealing that Aladdin wasn’t a real prince in the first place.  He then needs to figure out how to win the girl with his own merits and smarts, and we’re much more excited to see that victory.

 

Don’t make it easy for your protagonist.  Make sure that the first plan, the first solution, isn’t the last.  Force your main character to change her plans, fix a problem he caused, or maybe even find a new goal entirely.  Your protagonist might not thank you, but I promise your readers will!