Peril Needs Seminal Life-Changing Moment

I will review briefly what I am building here. Our protagonist lives in a neighborhood that is much like your neighborhood except that every neighbor craves a maximum amount of personal privacy. That includes our protagonist, but that works only so well. Someone or something enters this neighborhood and demands the protagonist's attention. That attention forces a slight crack in this need for personal privacy. Of course, that slight crack is only a precursor to larger fissures, which become the grist for expanding peril.

But how do those larger fissures form?

Enter the next key element: the unexpected person or event that trashes this veil of safety craved by the protagonist. One of his or her goals must be put on less-than-safe ground.

I could detail how I use this in my current novel, but I won't let the cat out of the bag as far as story details. I will gladly discuss those details with a literary agent because this part of the process opens a Pandora's box of possibilities.

Here's one thing I will add. This phase works best when there is a secondary revelation that is unexpected. I provide that in my novel, and it plays off every other phase of story-building I have discussed. This secondary revelation raises the stakes as much as the life-changing moment is capable of doing.

The key element in my style is to make all this fit within the format of the quiet neighborhood, but I inject story lines and details to make that run-of-the-mill neighborhood less than safe. It's like forming sinkholes under a Florida subdivision. Everything seems normal on the surface save for that intense need for personal privacy, but below the surface story elements are churning.

I love this method of world-building because of my journalism background. So many major stories happen in neighborhoods such as I build. A mother whose family runs a popular Northern California resort goes crazy one night and kills her husband and her children because she hears voices telling her that her life is in danger. (This story gets more bizarre because the murders occur on the night before tourist season begins.) In another case, a quiet, almost milquetoast family life hides looming disaster because the father goes crazy and kills the other family members. There are many other stories of petty jealousies erupting into violence in otherwise quiet surroundings. These events don't happen among large groups of drug dealers, and they sure as heck don't happen in some other-worldly place in which a Marvel comic would reside. It's the wildly uncommon happening in the most commonplace areas.

You see, I Am Peril On Your Street.