For those of you unfamiliar with the term a “MacGuffin” (sometimes McGuffin) is a thing that you are attempting to acquire or achieve. In “Into the Spiderverse” (possibly the greatest superhero film ever made), the MacGuffin is called a “Goober”, in “Pulp Fiction” (a film that exists) it’s a glowing suitcase, in the MCU it’s normally one of the Infinity Stones, and so on and so forth.
My next novel is going to be a cyberpunk-inspired heist, a halfway point between Oceans Eleven and Rogue One, but I haven’t figured out what the MacGuffin is going to be. And in this case it definitely matters since a lot of the story is going to hinge on my band of merry misfits fighting against an already victorious empire (think “Mistborn”, sorta… the bad guys have definitely won already, and the heroes aren’t trying to defeat them so much as rob them afterwards because if big evil empires have anything, it’s more loot than they know what to do with).
Anyway, that’s where I’m at with the story. I might just leave it nebulous for now and then figure it out when it comes up in the novel (or worse, just do that thing where I flag that I haven’t figured it out yet, write the whole novel, and then go back and edit in a MacGuffin which is surprising-yet-inevitable).
Also: how is it almost the end of April already!? That’s crazy, man. Where did the month go? I’m going to pull my bike out of storage tomorrow, get it ready to ride to work again this week, and hope that the temperatures stay above freezing. We will see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!