"Goodwin, you devilish rogue! What is a MacGuffin?"
I'm glad you asked. A MacGuffin is a plot device that drives the plot in fiction. Sometimes it's an object. Sometimes it's a person. Think of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, the maltese falcon from... The Maltese Falcon, or the Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The term was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock.
Basically, it's something that characters in a story all try to get. It does something amazing, or something horrible.
Why do I bring this up? Because I had one in my story, and it had an interesting problem. One that took forever to solve.
See, my object could do a specific thing relating to the story, and that was break through the massive storm in my story (which is key to the plot). Unfortunately, in order to further the plot, I had to have the bad guys be able to break through the storm themselves. It was the best thing to do for the story.
Now I still have this mystical object, being sought by everyone and protected by the heroes. Unfortunately, now it doesn't do anything. At all. Whatsoever. I can't get rid of it, though, because getting the damn thing is pretty much the goal of around 90% of the characters. So what is there to do?
That's when I figured it out: the object contains information on why the world is the way it is. It can be used to make things worse, which is why the bad guys want it. It can be used to improve things, which is why the good guys want it. And, it can't be used unless you know how, which gives it that whole "Mysterious" quality I wanted.
After figuring out the object's purpose, I wrote my way out of one of the corners.
With that out of the way, I only have a few corners left to solve: figuring out which characters are supposed to wind up in which group in the end, flesh out one of my supporting characters, and the ending.
This isn't one of my better posts, but oh well. Just needed to vent a problem I was having. More coming soon.
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