Story Idea #2

From the paper today:

A 68-year-old retired tourist is down in Mexico with his wife, in a busy downtown shopping area. A bad guy runs into the crowd with An AK-47 to shoot a 25-year-old gangster in what was presumably a targeted hit. But the AK-47 ain’t the most accurate assassins weapon and the old man, fearing for his wife’s life, leaps to push his wife out of the line of fire. He gets hit, as does a local woman. The police retrieve 50+ shell casings at the scene. The hero husband (Canadian of course) is recovering in the hospital and is going to be fine.

To me that speaks of married love. If I were doing it, it would probably be a literary piece from the husband’s p.o.v. about a couple that had been arguing or just lost their spark after too many years together. And maybe the man is feeling his years, his approaching end of life, his diminishing physical powers, his general sense of meaninglessness. Then the shooter shows up and, just like he’s read about so many times, he experiences the classic reactions to a mortal threat – time distortion, tunnel vision, insensitivity to pain. His instinct to protect his wife, borne of decades of habit and moral convention and what was once profound love, kicks in and he shoves her out of the way of the threat, taking a bullet in his leg for his efforts.

Now as a writer all of the above seems almost like a gift to me. It’s what I pretty much just “see” when I read this story and wonder how the husband felt. It’s the next step in the story that gets really fun. Because here’s where we decide if the husband lives or dies, is barely injured or permanently damaged, learns something profound from the encounter or doesn’t, is changed for the better, worse, or not at all.

(And of course if you’re a die-hard fantasy or surrealist writer, the shooter could have been a manifestation of the man’s subconscious, or an alien, or a messenger of God, or…)

Chances are your worldview (and mood the day you’re writing it) will direct the above choice. Maybe so strongly that it doesn’t even seem like a choice to you. That’s what writers call being carried along by the story, and that’s just fine. It can be very satisfying and may even lead you to the deepest, truest story your subconscious has to offer at the time.

Or maybe even considering the other options for a second will trigger a whole new, earth-shattering (for you) view of the world that you want to share with your readers. That too is good.

So what would you choose? Me, the mood I’m in today, I’d probably have my husband come to a deeper understanding of what his life means both to himself and the people around him. A good, if humbling lesson.

Though now that I look through my musings above, the idea of the gunman being somehow a physical manifestation of the husband’s earlier desires…