Don’t you love the sound of that word?
It sounds like the name of a much-loved animal friend or something like a scone you’d have slathered in cream and jam.
Anyway….
Quick answer: a MacGuffin is a trope that authors use.
Tropes are devices a writer fetches from their toolbox to appeal to their audience.
In fact, readers often expect these tropes and look forward to them.
The Trope Thesaurus by Jennifer Hilt (which I recommend) discusses in fun detail the tropes for fiction genres.
In middle grade, some of the tropes are the Orphan, the Secret, and the Fish Out of Water.
I think your chances of randomly choosing a middle grade book and finding the Orphan trope are probably 8 (maybe even 9) out of 10.
The Secret is a trope in which the character discovers something shocking about their family that helps them make sense of something important or that spurs them into action.
The Fish Out of Water is found in stories about bullying, school, adopted family, making friends, etc.
Back to the MacGuffin.
At first, I thought a MacGuffin was like an Easter Egg, which it isn’t.
Easter Eggs are symbols/words/names that writers plant throughout the story for readers to stumble across, just like an Easter egg.
Examples include things like other book titles, references to characters from popular books or movies.
They’re kind of like inside jokes between the author and the reader.
So what the heck is a MacGuffin?
Alfred Hitchcock coined the term in 1939.
Here’s how he explained it.
He said, “It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’
And the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’”
Which really clears nothing up.
Here’s what I’ve learned: A MacGuffin can be an object that is meaningless to the audience/reader but central to advancing the story.
It’s the necklace in the movie The Titanic.
The necklace itself isn’t important, except to allow the writers to begin to tell Rose’s story.
In the movie Psycho, it was stolen money, which motivated Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to stay at the Bates Motel.
Thinking back on that movie, I don’t recall money being an issue at all.
That’s how MacGuffin-y it was.
George Lucas had a slightly different definition of a MacGuffin.
His version is that the item is central to the plot and it couldn’t have been any other item.
For example, the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I was kind of thrilled to find out my current story has a MacGuffin in it: a feather fishing lure.
I didn’t even know what a MacGuffin was and here my whole story revolves around it.
It actually could have been anything, but a fishing lure piqued my interest.
Just goes to show you that you don’t need to know all the rules or tricks of writing fiction.
Just write the story.
Maybe start with a MacGuffin, slathered in jam.
Have a great week,
~ Gail
(Tick tock)
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