A Writer's Tale

In the original concept, the idea was for Susan to say, “Let me see your gun. Maybe I can fix it for you.” Or something to that effect.

As the story has developed to this point, however, that wouldn’t work.

Susan has brought the ammo to Spike in much the same spirit that a wife might chase down a husband who left for work without his wallet or sack lunch. But this is more serious. She certainly doesn’t want him to get killed for lack of his ammunition.

Just as she enters the store, however, she sees him try to shoot the clerk in cold blood.

And she is shocked.

Suddenly, she doesn’t want to give him the ammo.

But Spike knows she has it. The moment his gun doesn’t fire, he realizes that he forgot to load it before leaving the house. There can be only one reason for Susan showing up: she followed him from home to bring him the ammunition.

Now, he wants it.

But she won’t hand it over.

And the nature of the story has changed dramatically since we first started toying with it.

I sort of hate to leave behind the nifty, tricky little tale that we seemed to be developing at the start of all this.

If I’d stuck with it and pulled it off, it could’ve been a nice story of the kind that appear so often in mystery magazines.

Light, superficial, amusing, not very realistic.

But that story is gone.

Suddenly, we’ve uncovered a potential for a crime story with some real depth. There might still be humor in the interchanges between Susan and Spike (with the clerk for an audience), but there is a heaviness, a grimness, an opportunity to get very realistic.

Susan loves Spike, wants to help him, but doesn’t want him to murder the clerk and therefore doesn’t want to hand over the ammo. Spike must have the ammo. The clerk is a witness and has to die.

“I’ve gotta have that ammo, Sue!”

“So you can blow that poor man’s head off?”

It might go beyond words. He might attack Sue in hopes of getting his hands on the ammo.

As they try to resolve their problem, time is going by.

More customers might enter the store.

The clerk might try to make a break.

Cops might show up.

Anything might happen.

They’ve got to resolve their conflicts and hit the road before something hits the fan.

I suddenly see a possible wind-up. Remember their kid? Remember how they’re such good parents? Well, Susan wouldn’t rush off in the car and leave the kid home alone, would she?

She brought him along.

He’s out in the car, waiting.

But maybe he gets tired of waiting, and comes in to see what’s taking so long.

Maybe the clerk grabs the kid to use as a shield.

Susan’s kid.

You don’t screw with HER KID!

She tosses a bullet to Spike. He catches it, feeds it into the revolver and strides toward the clerk, pulling the trigger until the round makes its way to the cylinder…

And Spike puts a bullet through the clerk’s head.

And we have ourselves a story.

There is, however, one problem that should be dealt with.

Why didn’t Spike load his gun before leaving the house?

The answer to that question could change the entire story.

For instance, maybe he forgot to grab the ammo because he’d had a serious fight with Susan, that morning. Or maybe he or Susan had set down something in front of the cartridges a gift so that he simply didn’t see them and left them behind. Or maybe somebody else took them out of his gun for whatever reason.

The possibilities are almost endless.

But dealing with any of them would change the story drastically.

Let’s say that we don’t want to take the story into a completely new direction by dwelling on the story behind Spike walking out of the house without his ammo.

Simple.

It would be possible to ignore the issue. Just state it as a simple fact: he left his ammo home. Woops. These things happen. And these things do happen in real life. I enjoy allowing certain story elements to go unexplained sometimes.

Makes for realism. Crap happens.

However, some readers aren’t happy with that sort of thing.

They want every aspect to be nicely explained. They’ve come to expect it from reading mediocre books and watching movies and TV shows written by the numbers.

So, let’s give them a neat, logical explanation for Spike walking out of the house with his ammo.

One that won’t intrude on the story.

Last night, Spike and Susan celebrated their anniversary.

Spike got looped. The next morning, when he staggers out of bed and goes to work, he’s suffering from a terrible hangover. He can hardly think straight, so he forgets his ammunition.

The hangover not only provides a simple explanation for the ammo oversight, but also gives us some insight into Spike’s character and into his relationship with Susan. It might even give readers the idea that he doesn’t always go around trying to shoot store clerks.

It’s just that today he has this horrible hangover. He’s not “himself.”

And so it goes.

“Stick Up” started out in one direction, and ended up somewhere unexpected.