We are back! In these chapters, the situation really gets bad for David and Alan.

Synopsis: David is just trying to get back to his own part of the country. But in a shocking turn of events, Alan's enemy, the Red Fox, is assassinated. This creates a great crisis for Alan and his allies, who announce that they will give the pair up to the authorities if necessary. Alan and David have to race through the countryside without being detected. Tensions grow, between them, however, first when David sleeps through his watch, and, worse, when Alan loses all their money gambling. David grows sick and short-tempered, leading to a "quarrel" in chapter twenty-four.

Craft lesson: varieties of tension

This week's lesson is perhaps very simple. But I just really like how, in this stretch of the book, Kidnapped creates a series of different stresses and tensions. The story doesn't keep building up one specific danger or threat, but rather exposes our protagonists to a series of different tensions. I know that the normal craft of writing advice would be to keep one threat constant, to return again and again to the first risk or danger, but in this sort of adventure story, I think the variety works very well.

For instance: the friends arrive at the "House of Fear" in chapter 19, where they are told by their hosts that, if the authorities suspect him, he will "paper" Alan and David to save himself. David, through sheer coincidence, is getting wrapped up in the Jacobite struggle and risks the death penalty. Then they leave, and begin the "flight in the heather," crawling through heather bushes, sweating on a rock on a hot day as the soldier move nearby, getting ambushed...

There is such a variety of challenge in these chapters -- physical endurance walking, keeping watch, leaping across rivers, the heat of the sun, waiting for allies to come back.

Each time, Stevenson portrays the enormous strain on David. We aren't just cycling through one challenge after another: David is pushed to his limits in one way, then another. In chapter twenty, his need to leap across the rocks makes him first scared with vertigo, and then he barely survives the jump:

"... it was but my hands that reached the full length; these slipped, caught again, slipped again; and I was sliddering back into the lynn, when Alan seized me, first by the hair, then by the collar, and with a great strain dragged me into safety."

It's also made clear to us, more than once, that David's capacity is simply overwhelmed on this journey. Rather than presenting him as an all conquering, always active hero, Stevenson has him tell us that he gets so tired, so sick, that he is no longer thinking, that he would have been captured were it not for Alan or good luck.

We've all had that experience -- of being so tired, so physically overwhelmed -- that our will is just exhausted, that we make silly or dangerous mistakes -- or we would just give up, surrender, simply to be done with the exhaustion. David reaches that point several times here:

"I was by this time afraid of but one thing in the world; and that was to be set back upon the rock; anything else was welcome to me..."

This tension, of course, is not constant: they also meet friends and allies; there are periods of relative comfort.

My suggestion for today is: can you add some new kinds of tension for your protagonist? Can they be challenged in an additional way, whether it be water, or heat, or an unreliable ally? What would be one more threat to expose them to?

And -- if they did reach their limit, and couldn't do anymore -- how could the story nevertheless continue?

Yours,

Daniel

PS We are finishing Kidnapped next week. The week after, we read the first page of The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper.

PPS I hope you enjoyed the part of the book where David hears "English" for the first time and is not impressed!

Kidnapped to chapter 24

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