Sometimes, you have to stop yourself and realize that something’s not quite right. You’ve got some great elements put together but the end result isn’t quite as good as it could have been. There’s nothing wrong with using chocolate and butter together, and butter compliments corn, but somehow you ended up with a chocolate and corn confection that doesn’t work as an edible dish. It’s impressive in its presentation and the effort you provided, but nobody’s going to eat it.

But the chocolate’s good. Stick with that. Just try doing something else with it.

The metaphor’s a bit of a stretch, I know. But the notion is this. If you’ve written something, and constructive criticism points out a lot of elements that just don’t play to the work’s strengths, strip out those elements and do something else with those strengths. Preserve the core of your story, its key ingredient.

Most stories have a core, a fulcrum upon which the work turns. It could be an uplifting revelation the human condition, a tragic moment of heroic sacrifice in the face of the horrors of war, or a stinging bit of social or political satire. If some of the story doesn’t work to support that core, that does not mean the core is bad. It just means you need to change how people approach it. You have to get and hold the reader’s attention so you can reach that core, allow them to see exactly what you’re trying to say, and get them thinking about it, especially if you can plant the seed of thought that continues to grow long after they finish enjoying your work.

I know I keep bashing on Star Wars, but it’s a perfect example of how not to do this. Lucas established in his original films that the life of Anakin Skywalker had been a tragic, almost operatic rise and fall from grace into the darkness of Darth Vader. When he said he would go back and tell that story, I for one was excited. The depiction of a great villain starting out as a great and noble hero makes for some great storytelling. At least it could have. Instead, Lucas pandered to demographics, focused on spectacle rather than substance, and reduced the supposedly noble Anakin to a whiny, selfish, mass-murdering traitorous asshole.

Don’t do that.

If you need to scrap the bulk of your story and start over, hold onto the good parts. No, not the darlings, those need to get dragged out behind the shed and shot. I’m talking about the core of the story. The reason why you sat down to write it in the first place. The thing that keeps you up at night thinking about it and follows you through your waking hours.

Well, maybe, that’s just how I feel about it, but anyway…

Preserve the key ingredient, throw everything else out, and start over. Mix in some new things with that chocolate.

Like caramel.

Great. Now I’m hungry.

Today’s guest post comes to us courtesy of Monica Flink. She’s a long-standing and very dear friend who is also struggling to get away from the day job environment through the power of the written word. She’s been published on AOL.com, Lifescript.com and eHow. She has guest lectured at colleges and is a regular contributor to Squashblossom Literary Magazine. Her blog is Poached Prose.

Recently, a close friend of this author did her a solid. Like a two thousand dollar solid. And thus, in her pitiful attempt to repay him, she made him a cake. Not just any cake, but her best cake. Her patented Demonic Chocolate Fantasy Cake©. It is made with three pounds of Ghirardelli chocolate, and is enough to bring a lesser man to his knees with its layers of dark fudge cake, whipped ganache filling and fudge frosting.

So of course he had a massive coronary shortly afterward.

Death by cake is not something that the world thinks of seriously. It is reserved for chintzy chain restaurants that want to advertise a dessert that tastes decent but is pulled out of the freezer and reheated when you order it as something worth the extra three dollars. But it puts the idea of death on the discussion table, and how it seems to be easier to accept in fiction, especially the more ludicrous it happens to be.

There are so many ways for people to die. Human beings, though the top of the food chain, are fragile creatures when you think about it. Hundreds of functions go on without our knowing it, and just one of them can go wrong and kill us. If a heart stops beating or a kidney fails to cycle out waste, our lives are snuffed out as easily as a candle under an industrial fan. Sometimes without us even realizing that there is something wrong. But natural causes aside, there are also so many ways to stop those functions with resources.

The oldest books in the world, whether you believe it is the markings of the Pyramids, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, have touched upon death and have done so with plausibility. Albeit with swords and bird things that come to collect us all to the Afterlife, but it worked for those time periods. And there you have the heart of the matter. Plausibility in death. Harrowing up the feelings of readers for the payoff you so desire by giving the protagonist, antagonist, or hapless bystander the right send off, so to speak.

Making the death of characters believable is difficult at best, and mostly because so few of us have trouble not only imagining such horrible things, but have been given such a skewed idea of it from the media. I need not name names, but let’s face it, those Hostel moves are shit on a stick, and younger generations of writers are going to see that garbage and assume people who are tormented like that will not just die of shock unless they are medically treated.

Luckily, fiction lends its self to this problem, because fiction is just that: fiction. It need not be as realistic as other visual media, but then again, it may make things more difficult. A writer might think it cool to have someone die while crushed by tap dancing giant iguanas wearing feather boas, but even if circumstances in a work of fiction lend themselves to that kind of end, it is still hard to write. Just as it is hard to imagine someone dying by having a piece of cake that no one should eat more than a single sliver of.

Proof that truth is stranger than fiction, even with death involved?

Perhaps. Yet, it reveals not only how difficult it is to make death in fiction plausible. It is easy for us to accept that a magical spell can rip the heart from a person’s rib cage, or light them in a pillar of unquenchable fire, but only if the story lends its self to such ends. If a piece of fiction has been all about guns and car chases for a hundred thousand words, to have it end with someone falling in a river and drowning, or perhaps just being strangled to death, is not only anticlimactic, but the exact opposite of what would probably satisfy the audience.

In the end, it comes down to how well the characters are written, and how well the story lends its self to death. Will it be more satisfying to have the main villain die when he goes careening off a comfortably placed cliff with a few sharp spikes at the bottom that just happen to be there, or have an aneurysm in his brain splatter across the gray matter when he samples a piece of cake that should have never been made in the first place?

Coming up with a quote about writing about death would have been an excellent way to end this. Instead, I leave you all with the idea that writing about death does not have to be horrible, difficult, or even creative. It just needs to be believable.