Post-mortem: writing Fresh Salmon for McTavish

Critiquing choices in character, tone, setting, conflict, and climax for this comedy-horror short story

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

Let’s pull back the curtain on the writing of the short story Fresh Salmon for McTavish. In this post we’ll dig into:

• Making a relatable lead character

• Establishing tone

• Setting up situation & conflict in this comedy-horror

• The climax (in this case, a punchline).

This is a ‘post-mortem’, meaning we’re going to dig through details of the story and there will be spoilers throughout. If you want to enjoy the story without any of this knowledge, make sure you read it here first:

All good? Let’s get into it…

Making a relatable lead character

Every conventional story requires one or more characters - someone who the audience can pin their brain too, who they will follow through the events.

With a novel, we need to ensure that the reader is invested in the long-term development of the character. In the short story format, we need to sketch the character incredibly fast to get readers on board.

Blake Snyder, in his seminal book Save the Cat, writes persuasively that we need our lead character to be ‘likeable’ in some way. It’s not enough for them to be cool or sexy, but instead they must be a person who the reader wants to see overcome the challenges they face.

In Snyder’s book, he says we can do this with a ‘save the cat’ moment, i.e. the hero does something that we will appeal to the audience.

However, in Matt Bird’s ‘The Secrets of Story’ we get a slightly different take on how to make an audience root for a character: Bird says that rather than making protagonists ‘likeable’, writers should aim to make them ‘relatable’.

This is an interesting and nuanced version of the same idea, and touches on a deeper need of why people read: we read to experience a set of events that we might never personally go through. Vicarious living through books is like low-carbon travel for the mind. Making our characters ‘relatable’ is more powerful than only ‘likeable’.

Did I manage either of these in Fresh Salmon for McTavish?

Consider this section:

We’ve all been there: someone comes to us, uninformed, wanting us to hold their hand through something we know will lead to nothing.

It was important that McTavish remained likeable: he sees this as fun and harmless rather than exploitation, and so I made sure McTavish was, in the terms of stand-up comedy ‘punching up’. The ‘rich Sassenach’ was the butt of the joke, and no harm would be done.

In case you don’t know it, ‘Sassenach’ is a mild derogatory term for English people. It could easily be used as an insult, but it’s pretty gentle and could almost be affectionate, bordering on ‘clueless and naïve’ more than being truly offensive…

At least, that’s my impression of when I’ve heard Scots use it: although my surname includes ‘Haggis’, that’s nothing to do with Scotland and has a completely different etymology. I’m a Sassenach myself!

Establishing tone

I typically write contemporary-setting supernatural British horror, aiming for tones of the eerie, uncanny, or unsettling, but Fresh Salmon for McTavish is comedy-horror. How did I aim to create this lighter tone in the writing?