I like heist shows. My favorite is Leverage – a fun ensemble show that could be tagged “Robin Hood Meets Ocean’s 11.” There’s only one problem with with Leverage, and other heist shows in general: there’s no way those plans would work.
I remember the first time this became glaringly obvious to me. Some friends and I were watching McGyver. It was the 90s, and I’ll admit I was totally into the grunge thing. Flannel, garage band tee shirts and combat boots. I wore combat boots because Doc Martins were just not in my price range. My friends did, too. Well, in this particular episode McGyver used his foot to pry off a combat boot and fling it with his toes to move a lever and stop the machine about to kill him.
In unison, the entire room looked down at our feet, back at the TV and said, “No.” You see, if you’ve ever worn real combat boots you know that combat boots are designed specifically so you can’t just wiggle out of a fully-tied pair. Soldiers wouldn’t be able to walk for miles over rough terrain if it were that easy. Even assuming it was possible, somehow, you’d never be able to accurately hurl one 10 feet across a field with your toes and hit a lever, then have the lever move enough to stop the machine.
And the more shows I watch, the more obvious it becomes. Now, in real life, there’s good reasons not to show a heist that actually WOULD work. No need to encourage people to break the law. And the audience needs to see how it’s done, making it so completely obvious what’s happening it’s hard to believe the mark is missing it. So I had to find a way to suspend my disbelief in the face of my knowledge it could never, would never work.
I did: Superpowers.
With Leverage, I simply decided every member of the team had superpowers. That’s how the hacker could do all the things I knew couldn’t be done (as well as being equally good at all kinds of hacking, which isn’t realistic), the thief could steal things using complicated rigs from places that would have motion and heat sensors to detect her presence, a hitter could not only take a lot of hits with no permanent damage but also miraculously avoid gunfire, the grifter make incredibly obvious plays with bad accents while maintaining a bevy of fake identities that don’t backfire on her, and a mastermind who always has multiple backup plans and one of them always works. Superpowers. They are kind of like my own band of X-Men, but bad guys with a heart of gold.
The writing lesson for me, here, is that sometimes you have to veer from the strictly possible to the entertaining. I think we writers all have a bit of the Mary Sue wish fulfillment in us – we want our characters to smarter, faster, clever-er. You know, us, but better. But since we also don’t want to advertise our flaws, we don’t make it hard enough for the characters to do what needs to be done. That’s where the sage advice about learning to torture your characters comes in. And we really don’t want some pedantic reader to tear apart our clever plot by saying it simply couldn’t be done that way because they are an expert on some specific topic that you got wrong.
But maybe there’s another way. Maybe, we need to give our characters a touch of superpower. That way we can make the obstacles more complicated, harder, and just a touch impossible. Since your Mary Sue has a superpower, she can survive a jump that you’d never make. She can Rain-Man on a particular topic to figure out a convoluted puzzle. She can manage, somehow, to pry off that fully-tied combat boot and fling it across the room and hit a lever. If upon reflection it’s too much, you can always fix it in editing. But perhaps if you “go big” from the beginning, you can start with a plot that’s heart-pumping exciting rather than try to amp up one that’s drab but realistic.
Or I can always imagine your character has superpowers.
Ericka Kahler 