Tag: plot

Going There

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Sometimes, in the course of writing a short story or a novel, you come up to a scene that’s going to be . . . difficult.  You know going in that it’s going to be tough to write, because it means dealing with subject matter that makes you uncomfortable, or that could make at least some of your potential readers uncomfortable, or both.  It may touch on sex or violence or both, because as humans we tend to be kind of screwed up where those subjects are concerned, and especially screwed up at points where they intersect.†

At this point in the writing process, it’s usually a good idea to stop and ask yourself, “Do I really need to go there?”

Not “want” — we’ve already established that you don’t necessarily want to do any such thing.  You know that it’s going to be hard work, that it’s not going to make you happy while you’re doing it, and that there’s a good chance that at least some of your readers are going to be upset with you afterward.  So — not want, but need.  Is this the scene that’s going to best serve the long-term goals of your story?  Is its inclusion necessary to the truth — moral, thematic, artistic — of your story?  Can an equivalent but less disturbing scene serve the same purpose in your story, or would making such a substitution be tantamount to lying to your readers?

Some of the time, the answer is going to be “No, I don’t really need to go there.”  It’s entirely possible that what at first plot-outline thought seemed necessary is actually a hackneyed trope and the easy way out.  (Gratuitous rape scenes, I’m looking at you hard with a cold and fishy eye.  Common decency aside, gratuitous rape has been used so many times to provide characters with dark and troubled pasts, or motivate them to roaring rampages of revenge, that its inclusion in a narrative these days serves mostly as an indicator that the author couldn’t be bothered to think of anything original.)

Other times, however, you’re going to look at your story and ask it that question, and the story is going to look back at you and say, “Yes.  You need to do this.”

At that point, the thing to remember is:  Don’t flinch.

If you’ve made up your mind to go there — wherever “there” is for this story — step forward without hesitation.  Don’t walk around things you don’t want to look at, don’t keep your hands away from things you don’t want to touch.  Whatever you do, don’t worry about what your mother, your significant other, or the nice people in your writing group are going to think about you because you wrote this.  Think about your readers, who will always be able to tell when you’re dodging the issue, and keep yourself honest for them.

Nobody ever said that writing was a job for the timid.

†It could involve almost anything, though. There’s no telling what a given person may find unpleasant or disturbing.

Thought for the Day

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If you need to slow a character down, or put him out of action for a bit, there’s no need to break his leg, give him a concussion, and make him come down with infectious equine encephalitis, all at once.

Spraining his ankle is usually enough to do the job.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve falls into the Annoying Plot Developments category.

Say you’ve got a character who has been told by the bad guys, “Don’t go to the police or else very bad things will happen.”  Or a character who is being pressured or blackmailed by the bad guys into doing something that will jeopardize their relationship with their one true (and presumably competent) love.

Do they, at that point, go straight to the authorities or the one true love and say:

Sirs/My Darling [as appropriate]–

The villainous kidnappers/my wicked uncle [as appropriate]

Want/wants me to steal government secrets/hide him in the hayloft [as appropriate]

Which will naturally cause you to believe that I am a spy/am meeting a secret lover [as appropriate]

No, they do not.  And a goodly chunk of the middle of the novel is taken up with the resulting unnecessary running-around — which may have been the reason for the annoying plot development in the first place.  But it is a sloppy and clichéd way to handle the problem, and your readers deserve better.

Tying Up the Loose Ends

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The hardest part of a novel, sometimes, is ending it.

Because you can’t just bring the thing to a halt at the end of the main action, no matter how greatly you may be tempted.  You have do the wrap-up, the bit where — if the book in question were a fat Victorian novel — the reader would be told who got married, and who took his prize money and bought a tavern, and who took off for Australia or the Yukon and was never seen again.  This would be the classic Where Are They Now epilogue.

How long should the wrap-up be?  Unhelpfully, the best answer is “long enough.”  A short story can wrap up in a single paragraph, or a single sentence.  A novel takes longer — the longer the main story, the more wrap-up time it’s going to need.  Tolkien is notorious for ending The Lord of the Rings four times before he’s done — taking the hobbits in stages back the way they came from Gondor to the Shire, closing all his parentheses in order.

Wibble.

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I’ve either got a slight but wearying cold or a bad case of three-scenes-left-in-the-novel — whichever one it is, it’s got me feeling cranky and distracted. (For example, I lay in bed for about five minutes this morning, on the cusp between sleep and waking, while my mind tried to settle on whether today was Thursday or Friday. Eventually I woke up enough to tell myself, “It’s Wednesday, stupid,” but yeah. Distracted.)

The problem with the three scenes left in the novel is that in order to make one of them work, I’m going have to go back and tweak about four or five other scenes, because in order for the character in question to do the thing he’s about to do, it turns out that he needs to know something that he currently doesn’t. I could just tell myself, “Assume the knowledge and fix it in the revisions”, but my mind doesn’t work that way. If I don’t go back and fix those bits, the scene will stubbornly refuse to gel.

At this final stage of the game, my distractability level is always high, because so much of my mind is somewhere else altogether. At times, this can bring on a blessed kind of tunnel vision, where all worries that aren’t the book fall away for a while; at other times, all it does is make me more likely to walk into both literal and metaphorical walls.

Peeve of the Day

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I don’t like novels or short stories where the author deliberately withholds stuff from the reader.

I’m not talking about mysteries, where part of the fun is in the puzzle and in the timing of the revelations; also, part of the thematic point of most mystery novels — even more than questions of innocence and guilt and justice — is the revelation of truth.  I’m talking about stories where there is something significant about one of the characters, or about some aspect of the general milieu of the story, or about the resolution, that the author clearly knows but doesn’t choose to tell, instead toying with the reveal like a fan dancer in the burlesque.

Stories where the gender of the main character or first person narrator is kept hidden — especially if it’s revealed, gotcha!-fashion, at the end — are a particular irritant as far as I’m concerned.  This, I will admit, is mostly a matter of personal taste, since I have known discriminating readers for whom such stories were like catnip to a Siamese.  And it’s not even an absolute thing with me; I’m quite fond of the mystery novels of the late Sarah Caudwell, who never did reveal the gender of their first-person narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar.  (I always pictured Professor Tamar as looking rather like an anthropomorphic sheep as drawn by Sir John Tenniel for a missing scene from Alice in Wonderland . . . in the absence of data, the human mind does strange things.)  But Caudwell is a case of good writing plus good story trumping almost everything else; but a story that isn’t top-notch in both those areas is going to lose me before it goes very far.

Almost as irritating, where I’m concerned, are stories where the resolution is left open, in “The Lady or the Tiger” fashion, especially when the story seems to be offering the reader a deliberate ambiguity in order to establish some sort of literary street cred.  Again, some people find endings like that to be right down their alley; I’m just not one of them.  Instead, such endings make me cranky and resentful, because I always suspect in my heart that the author knows the true ending and is deliberately holding out on me — I think it’s because, as a writer, I can’t imagine not knowing the true ending of something I’ve written.

The moral of the story, if there is one:  Don’t ever be accidentally ambiguous.  If you’re going to do it, do it on purpose, in the full awareness that you’re probably going to lose some of your audience that way, and in the firm belief that whatever you’re trying to do or say with your story is worth the risk.

The Fine Art of Handwaving

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If you’re going to write in the science fiction or fantasy genres, sooner or later you’re going to end up handwaving an explanation.  Other genres sometimes do it too, but other genres don’t regularly work with props and plot elements that don’t yet and may never exist.

Some handwaving is easy, because the genre as a whole expects it.  Take faster-than-light space travel, for example — sf writers have been handwaving that one for so long that all they need to say is something like “hyperspace” or “wormhole jump” and the reader is there for the ride.  Readers aren’t dumb.  They know perfectly well that if the author of the story actually had the plans for a working faster-than-light drive, he or she wouldn’t be writing adventure stories for a living.   Too much explanation, in this case, would bring on a case of Handwaving Fail — all the audience wants to know is that the author is aware of the problems with faster-than-light travel, and that for the purposes of the story, those problems have been solved.  They don’t really want all the equations plus a diagram.

Sometimes the handwaving has to be subtler.  If you’re introducing a bit of tech that you’ve postulated just for the occasion, don’t draw attention to its extraordinary or purpose-built nature.  If you talk about it and around it as though it’s been hanging around the laboratory or the workbench or whatever since well before the current problems started, the reader will think of it as just another piece of the furniture, and with that you can slip it into its place in the story without occasioning comment.

If you’re looking at the need for a really large job of handwaving, stronger measures may be required.  My husband and I once co-wrote a YA thriller for a packaged series, and found ourselves working with a plot that would have ground to a shuddering halt if the main character had ever actually sat down and talked to the police about what was going on.  We got past that difficulty — and did it without making our main character an idiot — by compressing the timeline of the novel into two or three days and keeping our protagonist on the move and short on sleep the whole time.

So.  Three general tips:

Use built-in handwaves where the genre allows for them.

Don’t point at what you’re handwaving.

And when in doubt, keep things moving fast enough that nobody has time to stop and think.

 

A Thing to Do with Brownies. Also with Plots.

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If you’ve got a box of brownie mix — or a somewhat pedestrian scratch brownie recipe — you can elevate plain but good brownies into interestingly different brownies with the addition of about a teaspoon of cinnamon and a scant quarter-teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

You can do the same thing with a standard plot.  Throw in a couple of unexpected elements, something sweet and fragrant like cinnamon and something hot and tingly like cayenne pepper, and an ordinary story becomes a pleasing departure from what the reader expected — while at the same time still being the solid good thing (mmm, chocolate)  that he or she wanted in the first place.

An Underutilized Plot Resource

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The story is never about the middle kid.  The eldest gets to be the heir, or sometimes the lost heir, or occasionally the bully or the man in charge or the villainous oppressor (or the mimetic-realism equivalents of the above.)  The youngest is the bold one who goes out into the world to find his fortune, or the virtuous and kindly one who wins while the older siblings are undone by their own unpleasantness, or sometimes the mysteriously adopted foundling or the one with special powers.

But nobody ever tells a story about the middle kid.

This is a law of storytelling that could, under the right circumstances, be profitably broken.  But it would take work.  A novel of mimetic realism would want to make itself into a family problem novel about the angst and trials of being a middle kid; a fantasy novel would want to deliberately subvert the archetype.  Novels in other genres would want to handle the problem by thrusting the protagonist’s family so far into the background that he might as well have sprung fully-formed from the brow of the CIA, or the USMC, or the NYPD, or the faculty of Harvard Law.

The last-named case moves us over into “action heroes don’t have families” territory — which is a profoundly unrealistic motif.  But nobody wants to think about the noir-story LA private eye with his trench coat and his fedora and his world-weary outlook going back home to Toledo, Ohio, for Thanksgiving, where he spends a long weekend not as the owner and sole operative of AAA Investigations Incorporated, but as Joey the middle kid who gets ribbed by his siblings for showing up looking like a poser on TV and whose mother wants to know if he’s met any nice girls yet out there in California.  After four days of this, murder and palm trees and brutal cops and corrupt city officials start looking really good.

Writing an ordinary family with no more than the normal amount of inter-sibling and parent-child conflict can be hard work.  It’s no wonder, really, that so many writers resort to making their protagonists orphans, or to giving them dysfunctional families that they don’t talk to any more.  But it does leave a lot of open territory out there, just waiting to be explored.

A Useful Rule

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(Well, all right.  It’s more like a guideline….)

Don’t violate natural chronology in your story without a really good reason.

I’m not going to say you should never do it, because sometimes there’s just no other way to get necessary information across to the reader, and because sometimes the violation or alteration of natural chronology is the main effect or whole point of the tale.  But before you send your plot into a temporal zigzag, think long and hard about whether or not those conditions apply, because the failure modes can get ugly.

Possible failure mode number one:  Your reader may get lost and confused by all the flashing back and forth, and give up on finishing the story.  If you’re going to use the flashback technique to deal with important events in the story’s past that deserve a full and direct presentation, be extra-careful to provide your reader with markers and signposts.  Give them details (verb tense changes, time and place references in the narrative, even explicit chapter or section headers if you think you need them) to let them know they’re heading into the past, and more details on the other side to let them know they’re coming back out of it.  No, it’s not mollycoddling your readers to do this; and you aren’t building a mental obstacle course for them so they can get a gold medal for running it, either.

Possible failure mode number two:  your readers may get more interested in the past of your story than in its present.  This happens a lot with the sort of books where the main plot arc involves finding out the deeply buried family secret, or the suffering hero’s secret trauma, or the dreadful thing that the students of Professor Thingummy’s Early Western Drama class did during the summer of 1995.  If you’ve got something portentous and dramatic like that lurking in the backstory for the hero or heroine to find out, you need to make sure you’ve got something even more portentous and dramatic going on in the front story, just to make certain that your reader cares enough about the story’s present to want to keep on reading about it.  Otherwise, your readers are likely to read the interesting backstory bits and skip the boring front story bits, which will leave them with only half the book that you meant them to read.

(Yes, I admit it.  I once co-wrote a book where a good portion of the plot involved a bunch of interpolated backstory bits.  In my defense, I set them off from the main text in separate chapters and labelled them and timestamped them clearly, and ran them in their own proper chronological order.  I thought it was necessary.  And I hope it worked.)