I Was Saved From a Tired, Harmful Trope

Twitter is the most useful dystopia on the internet for me. And today, thanks to Twitter, I stumbled across some incredibly valuable advice.

Throughout the construction of The Outer Range, I've tried to be mindful of stereotypes, common tropes, and other crutches in my writing. Well, there was a big one that I missed. A series of clicks starting on Twitter, and ending at Rob Hart’s PitchWars wishlist, helped expose it.

There is a pitch contest going on in the Twitterverse called PitchWars. Published and represented authors offer themselves up as mentors. As part of the process, you take a look at the list of mentors and their areas of interest and expertise. Each mentor has a list of what they're looking for, and what they're NOT looking for.

I came across a mentor that looked like a solid fit. But then... I moved onto what he was NOT interested in.

"A violent act against a woman as the inciting incident." There it was. And it was like a hot light shining down on the first death in The Outer Range. Without being intentional, I was borrowing a very tired cliche of the detective genre. The screams. The murder. The graceful fingers, paled by death. The heavy black body bag getting zipped up. While I had my own slant, the first bit of action in my novel was the murder of a young woman. Crap.

I've spent the last few hours digging into this and here's what I came away with. I have four deaths in the first act of my novel. After thinking this over, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are all necessary and move the plot forward. Four people need to die in the first seventy-five pages.

That said, three of the four people do not have to be women. The first murder is a crime of necessity. The flow of information has to be stopped. Someone has to die. What starts as a small, seemingly straightforward case warps and grows into something tangled and all consuming. I wrote that first death scene with a girl as my victim because it was easy. It’s as simple as that. She’s young, scared and vulnerable. You want her to be alright. To make it out. But she doesn’t. The scene works as written, but it was reliant on the tired trope of “violence against women” as the inciting incident. It served its purpose and I moved on to the more nuanced aspects of the plot.

I’ve now edited all scenes that involve this character, as well as scenes following up on it. My murder victim, Maddie, has been updated to Caden. The best-friend and confidant has changed from Nicholas to Nicki. As I was going through the process I made a conscious decision not to alter the scenes beyond changing names and pronouns. In his scene, Caden is scared, reacting in all the same ways that Maddie did. And when Nicki is questioned, she tries to maintain a sense of strength and composure, in the same way Nicholas had.

And you know what? Because I’m not relying on gender norms in those scenes, they work BETTER. In fact, this adjustment adds to the disparities and dynamics between those in the wealthy, cultish conformity of the Quarantine Zone and those outside its walls who were forced to survive and adapt.

So thank you Twitter, the folks that pointed me towards PitchWars, and Rob Hart. My story is that much better because of you.