Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks

Author:Terry Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780345463586
Publisher: Ballantine Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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The reader wants to see something happen

between pages one and four hundred, and nothing

happens if the characters don’t change.

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MAUD MANX,

PART ONE

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OKAY, IT’S TIME for some fun.

Not that we haven’t been having plenty up until now, of course. But all this talk about craft can be pretty dry in the absence of examples that remind us that writing should always be, first and foremost, enjoyable.

I have some rules about writing that I follow rather rigorously, and this seems a good place to talk about them. They don’t mean much outside of their practical application, so I thought I would give you a look at the way I might use them in my writing. But I don’t want to tackle this task with anything serious and certainly not with one of my own books (Do you think I’m nuts?) so I have invented a story that I hope will illustrate the importance of my rules without putting you to sleep.

Let’s pretend that I have decided to write a thriller. I’ve finished my dream time and come up with a fairly typical sort of tale. It involves a retired government operative, once the best in the business, who has been hunted down by her lifelong nemesis and now faces one final confrontation before she goes to that big CIA complex in the sky. This will be a classic kind of story, the hero alone against impossible odds, her courage and strength of character tested as she discovers that you can never really escape your past.

My lead character is Maud Manx, a real road warrior. At eighty years of age, she has slowed down a bit. She has only one arm, loves cats, hates birds, and once worked as a bookseller for a small independent bookstore specializing in books on plants and animals. She was with the CIA for thirty years, but has been retired for the past fifteen in the little town of Octogenarian, Montana, where she lives up in the mountains in a small cabin with her aging toms, Kibbles and Bits.

Her enemy is a ruthless scientist named Feral Finch. Finch was a CIA operative, as well, but he turned rogue and eventually formed his own network of troublemakers who have plagued the CIA ever since. Maud and Finch were once partners, but now are bitter enemies. Finch, in an experiment gone horribly wrong, turned himself from a man into a large bird and is unable to regain his human form. Embittered and vengeful, he blames the government (well, who doesn’t?) for his problems. He also blames Maud. In an earlier confrontation, Finch, in his bird form, took off Maud’s arm at the shoulder.

They haven’t done battle in twenty years, but now Finch has come in search of Maud with the intent of doing her in. Alone and seemingly unprotected, her association with the CIA long since ended, her strength depleted with age, and her skills dissipated by the passing of time, Maud must face her enemy alone.

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