3 Tips for Writing an Abduction Scene

So, you’re thinking about abducting someone.

(Balancing Humor and Trauma in Middle-Grade Fiction)

I mean, thinking about having a character in your book abduct someone. Here’s my first tip: Climb a mountain instead. It’d be less difficult!

I’m joking, of course, but I’ve discovered that writing a kidnapping event can be quite a challenge. There is no way around the fact that this is high drama. Even with no injury to the victim during the event, the sudden violence is traumatic.

When I hear the word “abduction,” I visualize the kidnapped wife in the movie Fargo who tries to run away. With her hands bound, her head covered by a hood, she falls in the snow. Her body language conveys frantic terror. To this day I’m distressed by this scene.

In writing my techno-thriller, The Child Riddler, I stayed with my kidnapping plot despite my feelings. I liked the story: An elite operative is sent to abduct 9-year-old Leah. This child is the only one who knows the riddle holding the code to unleash a cloaking spider bot—the first ever “invisibility” nanoweapon and the most lethal weapon on earth.

But I was concerned. With a child as the kidnapping victim, the emotional impact escalates tenfold. Also, the book contains several more action-packed scenes involving the main character, a globe-trotter on the chase. The dramatic event in Leah’s life could easily overshadow the other action sequences, nullifying the story’s suspense.

To craft an abduction scene that serves as a central plot point—but doesn’t overpower the story—I focused on three concepts.

Readers have expectations when they pick a novel category or genre. In a techno-thriller, fast-paced action and technology are the dominant elements. My readers did not select immersion in gut-wrenching scenes of a kidnapped victim’s family suffering in fear and anxiety. I could lose them with this emotional content.

I had to stay true to my genre, which meant toning down the fervor. I eliminated the dramatic element of a grief-stricken family. This is what felt like climbing a mountain. Removing a child’s family from the story took a lot of creative thinking. Also, including the abduction planning and discussion up front in the story reduced the surprise element, thus lessening the drama. More on this later.

On the other hand, if you’re writing in a genre where readers expect emotion, do the opposite. Dive into personal dynamics. Build emotional bonds between the family and victim. Include touching scenes describing strong relationships. Then, when the abduction occurs, it tears the readers’ hearts out too.

For the shock element, first construct a world where the victim lives in a secure cocoon with a happy routine and trust in their surroundings. In The Child Riddler, Leah lives in a world she doesn’t trust. Since her “safe” world isn’t all that secure, her abduction isn’t as traumatic. This helps take down the emotion a notch.

An abduction is action. To me, structuring an action scene is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Just as a puzzle’s many irregular pieces must be assembled, there are a myriad of motives as to why someone would be kidnapped, and a thousand possible scenarios.

But there is only one way it will work. The motives that drive the abduction, and the action sequences themselves, must be realistic. If readers don’t believe the reasoning behind the kidnapping, the scene deflates with no reader engagement.

I find the key to realism is logic. Just as you methodically match puzzle pieces by color, size, or shape, a series of questions must be answered before you can interlock action sequences. Fitted together, the story flows because it makes sense. If it makes sense, the readers will accept and believe it.

In The Child Riddler, there’s clear motivation for the kidnapping of Leah. She had the code for the “invisibility” nanobot weapon. My challenge was to stay within the dramatic boundaries of the book’s genre. Leah had to have parents, right? They’d be in agony if she were kidnapped. There would also be other family members like siblings, wouldn’t there? They’d be traumatized. Friends might also be involved. Wouldn’t they help the parents search for the child? The emotional barometer spiked upward as I realized everyone who’d be impacted by the poor child’s abduction.

I had to come up with logical scenarios to eliminate the involvement of parents, siblings, and friends. This wasn’t easy. Happily, I didn’t have to work on tempering the shock effect of Leah’s abduction, since readers knew it was happening.

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As William Shakespeare shared in his brilliant writing more than 400 years ago, emotions—want, love, hate, jealousy, fear, joy—cause people to take extreme actions. Emotion is part of our personal dynamics, the reactive forces that drive us to respond to a situation in a certain way.

I suggest bringing in the kidnap victim’s personal dynamics with family members and friends as soon as possible. This way, when the abduction occurs, the reader is emotionally invested and will be gripped by the fear and anxiety of the event.

With personal dynamics, you control the story’s emotional thermostat. Like starting a fire with kindling, you first engage the characters. Once the story smolders, you add more fuel with conflicts, so the flames rise higher and higher. Or, you let it smolder as I did, so that the abduction just adds heat to the story and doesn’t engulf the other novel plot points.

To smolder or burn, that is the question we writers face on almost every page. Whether to smolder or burn drives our plot pacing down to each tiny scene beat. The craft of storytelling is not an easy one. It becomes even harder when we’re faced with developing a high-impact event such as an abduction. In times like these I often turn to the sage advice Friar Laurence gave Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “Wisely, and slow; they stumble that run fast."

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