Ingredients for Adventure
Five Elements Adventure Fiction Absolutely Must Have
Adventure is neat to read about and not so much to live. I mean, some people like living adventurously. Some people like skydiving and scuba diving and other kinds of diving. Cave diving, the scariest one. I’m like a hobbit. Like a respectable hobbit, not one of the Bagginses. I would never even think about going on an adventure. I want to read about adventure from the safety of my couch.
Life has felt like an adventure lately. I am ready for life to go back to being boring.
I’ve been reading a lot of adventure novels lately, mostly fantasy romance–style ones about people going on epic quests, and it got me thinking about the adventure genre generally and what’s so appealing about it. First, I’m not even sure I can call it a genre because it’s a type of story you can find in every genre. There is adventure fantasy (like The Hobbit), adventure science fiction (like Ancillary Justice), horror adventure (like Dark Matter)—there’s a whole subgenre of seafaring adventure like Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea—there’s adventure nonfiction like Into the Wild . . . adventure themes touch many kinds of book.
Regardless of genre, adventure stories all have a few things in common and these commonalities are what make them so appealing. If you’re writing an adventure story, you’re going to want to make sure your tale has all of the below, and plenty of each.
Danger
Every adventure story needs an element of danger. Personally, I don’t think this has to be physical danger—although that’s the easiest sell. Emotional danger propels a lot of romantic adventure stories and financial, legal, or political danger, likewise, fuels thrillers. The important thing is the protagonist has to be exposed to some sort of danger that threatens adverse consequences—usually serious ones, but in the case of “cozy” adventure the consequences could be more trivial.
The feeling of being in danger is universally understood. I dare say that literally every person has had the experience of feeling danger at some point. Maybe it was such an everyday thing as a near miss on the highway, or almost missing one’s flight, or catching a serious mistake in one’s work. It could be the perception of danger where there wasn’t any, really, like when I see a spider or find myself in a high place. I think we’ve all experienced the physical stress responses—the burst of adrenaline that supports the fight-or-flight impulse, the sweaty palms, the increased heart rate—that is our body signaling to us that we’re in danger. The hormonal response is Whoopi Goldberg in the movie Ghost (1990) and our brain is Demi Moore.
Because this sense of peril is universally relatable, imbuing your protagonist’s journey with danger in ample quantities will drag your reader right into the thick of things, which is just where you want them.
Risk
The protagonist must have something to lose.
It’s not enough that the protagonist has something to gain, although that may be what motivates them at the outset. The risk of losing something must join the fray at some point—some point before the midpoint, preferably—to ensure the protagonist cannot turn back and return to their status quo—whatever their status quo was before the inciting incident happened.
A protagonist might turn away from an opportunity to gain something when the going gets really, really tough. There has to be a risk of loss—an untenable loss—to keep the protagonist striving toward a resolution in their darkest times. Whatever it is the protagonist values most. That’s what should be at risk.
Opportunity
The protagonist must have something to gain.
It’s not enough that the protagonist has an untenable loss in the cards if they don’t succeed, although they have to have that, too. There has to be something the protagonist can gain—that puts them in a better place or position than their original status quo—to satisfy the reader. In other words, it can’t be all doom and gloom—it can’t be all avoiding the worst possible outcome. There also has to be the hope of a reward if the protagonist is successful.
Risk and opportunity together equal the story’s stakes. Stakes are critical in any kind of story.
Uncertainty
Even if you, the reader, going into a story, know that it’s going to have a happy ending—for instance, when you’re reading a romance novel—uncertainty is required for adventure.
Danger, risk, and opportunity cannot exist without uncertainty. If the outcome of a situation is known to be safe? Danger can’t exist. If the outcome of a gamble is a sure thing? Risk doesn’t exist. Likewise, opportunity can’t exist when there’s no chance of failure—then it’s just a gain, not an opportunity.
Whatever your protagonist has going on in their adventure, you (the author) have a duty to inject uncertainty into the outcome. You have to craft the odds carefully: If the odds are so stacked against the protagonist that they can’t win, then you eliminate uncertainty—the reader knows a deus ex machina or some other cheat will have to save the day. But if you don’t stack the odds enough against your protagonist, then their success is a sure thing and the reader will get bored with the story early.
The goal is to leave the slimmest possible odds of your protagonist succeeding without crushing the reader’s hope that they can pull through. Important distinction: Feel free to crush your protagonist’s hope that they can succeed. Just leave the reader a little thread.
Speed
The final thing every adventure story requires is a speedy pace. Fast-paced stories build excitement and dramatic tension that propel the reader through the story. An adventure story is a really hard sell if it’s told at a slow or even a medium pace. The danger, uncertainty, and risk—the adventure factors detailed above—are all heightened by a fast pace. Moving through the story quickly, and encountering new twists and turns at rapid intervals, leaves the reader with little time to reflect, chill out, and absorb. This is what you want in an adventure story—you want to engage the reader to experience it the same way your protagonist experiences it. Frantic, frenetic, fast, and furious. Keep the reader, like the protagonist, on the edge of their seat.
Pacing is something that’s best fine-tuned in revision. Don’t stress over it while you’re drafting if thinking about the pace could slow down your writing, but do ask alpha and beta readers to give you feedback on the pace and adjust for speed if they don’t describe your pacing as fast. Adventure isn’t for the faint of heart or the slow of pace.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.