Paksworld

In real life as in fiction,  interest picks up when things go wrong.   We enjoy (and enjoy reading a little about) when things go right…the travelers are gliding along a smooth lake, surrounded by beautiful scenery, eating delicious food, enjoying the company of delightful companions, but after awhile it feels/reads like an ad from a tour company.   Though a few pages of this can build suspense (because surely something will go wrong) too much is soon too much.   We think we want that life, but many of us–when things are going too well–start rocking our own boats.  If it’s going well, why not try this…or that…?

It’s been a less than perfect week for me, in terms of writing and living both–sleeping badly, due in part to sinus troubles, and writing badly, due in part to lack of sleep and thick-headedness from the sinuses.  External annoyances have not been absent, either.

Sleepless nights have led to reading things I haven’t looked at in years, including (rare when I’m writing fantasy) some old fantasy novels.   Also old mysteries and anything else within reach at 3 am.   One in particular stuck with me in light of “things going wrong”–The Burning Stone, by Deborah Turner Harris.     I pulled it off the shelf the third night in a row I hadn’t been sleeping much (if any) and did not recall anything about it–it’s been that long.   It’s well-written, which means that if my head had not been pounding with a sinus migraine,  I would have read the surface and not been conscious of the mechanism propelling it from below…but the headache’s effect on my reading was to shift it into editorial mode.  So that “things going wrong” were practically outlined in glowing red.  (Some other things were also clearly visible, but aren’t in this topic.)

Harris is, as I said, a thoroughly competent writer with a gift for vivid description and characters that feel rounded and real.   They have backstory; they have reasons for being as they are.   But Harris never lets that gift for vivid description of places, weather, food, things, get in the way of the story’s forward motion…and the mechanism (though it’s more interesting than the word mechanism sounds) is things going wrong.   Unlike some writers, Harris makes use of multiple trigger points for the things going wrong: what goes wrong shifts from character to character, from one type of choice to another, from major things going wrong  to little things going wrong.    In some books, most of the things going wrong can be traced to one repeated cause–or all the things going wrong are of the same scale (grand or trivial) and that soon becomes boring.

In classic storytelling, things must go wrong–and in ideal classic storytelling, most of the things going wrong arise from the character who’s impacted by the going wrong.   The character’s actions don’t have the effect he/she expects, and then he/she tries something else.  Outside events (weather,  brigand raid, epidemic)  can certainly be things going wrong, but if all the wrong is external, the character reads as ineffective.    The character needs to be effective–and wrong–through much of the story.

But there’s another complication.  If the character is effective…but wrong too much of the time or from simple incompetence…the character isn’t attractive to readers.    Making the same mistake a dozen times in fiction is just as annoying as making the same mistake a dozen times in real life.   It can work in humor (Charlie Brown is never going to kick Lucy instead of the football she just yanked away) but not in a story.    Ideally, the reader is cheering on the character, hoping that this attempt will succeed.  So the character has to get some things right, in spite of having things go wrong much of the time.

Harris does this well (the jailbreak, for instance.)    Things go wrong frequently but the cause of the going wrong is varied enough–and within any one character mixed with some things going right–so that the reader isn’t (unless up in the middle of the night with a sinus migraine that shuts down the creativity but leaves the editor-mind working) alerted to notice the regularity of timing.   There’s never a slack place in the tension, but the tension shifts from one strand of the line to another.

Tension–and its near twin suspense–are what pull readers through a book so it doesn’t get dropped near the couch when the phone rings and then not picked up for days.   When things go wrong, the reader’s mental alertness sharpens (as it would with things going wrong in real life)  and the reader wants to know “What next?  How is she/he going to get out of this one?”   Readers learn from reading how much they can predict of what comes next…with this writer of detective stories, the “things going wrong” are going to be administrative glitches in the police hierarchy….with this one, it’s another murder, and then another murder.

Most compelling are those books in which there’s certainty of things going wrong, but great variation in what the things are and from what motivation they arise…so that the reader sees the character coping with a realistic mix of challenges–some minor but annoying, some difficult but manageable with the right mental/psychological tools (which the character can only sometimes deploy) and some almost insurmountable.   Thus on any given day we may get a paper cut or a painful bruise, discover that a deposit wasn’t received by the bank and we’re overdrawn,  drop a raw egg on the kitchen floor,  quarrel with a friend, be told of a life-threatening diagnosis.   We may handle any one or several of these well or badly, in a way that sets up a better/worse reaction to the next of the day’s trials.

In a book, any of them might foreshadow something else.   In one of Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley books, a character’s old and badly-maintained car is difficult to start…and that difficulty leads eventually to the character taking another character’s car and deliberately crashing it…to save the other character’s life.   But it also means she has no cellphone to call for backup.  So the incidents earlier in the book, when her car is hard to start, set up the final confrontation.  Her having an old cheap car that’s badly maintained fits her character, who through the series is shown to be the kind of person who has defined herself as not worthy of having anything better.  But that’s not all: the destruction of the other character’s expensive car–necessary to save his physical life–resonates with events that have already destroyed his psychological life and foreshadows (leading to a later book) what may be necessary to save him as a person.   I have sometimes been annoyed with George for what seemed to me to be too much pushing of certain emotional buttons…but the interlocking patterns here are masterful.

Nonfiction is different in some ways, and not in others.  Among the nonfiction night-reading of the week (some was science journals) were two autobiographies I re-read,  Lewis Puller’s  Fortunate Son (some of you will recognize the name “Puller”–this is Chesty Puller’s son) and Janis Ian’s Society’s Child.   Both of these had plenty of “things going wrong” but–unlike a fiction book–their lives were real-world lives, without the constructed story-arc (though I think both tried to make sense of their stories in that way.)   What’s useful for a fiction writer is that the same mix of things going wrong–from little ones that sometimes were merely tiny foreshadowings of things to come and sometimes seemed unconnected to big obvious lit-with-floodlights-and-announced-with-trumpets ones–existed in their real lives as in fiction.   When people write their autobiographies, they include “trivial” things…but it’s clear they feel those small things going wrong (or right) are significant (nobody includes every detail…)  They may not make the connection clear–or they may highlight it–but it’s there because to them–the person writing the autobiography–it matters.   To this reader, the autobiographies had much less pull because the things going wrong were not arranged (as in a story) in a true story arc.   I was interested in those particular people, and thus kept re-reading, but not as steadily  or with any sense of suspense.

Some nonfiction is very suspenseful, in the same way as fiction, when it centers on discovery, on management of a disaster, something that has already kicked on the “when things go wrong, what now?” buttons in the human brain.

I bought P.D. James’  Talking About Detective Fiction at Dragon*Con, hoping it would have more about the craft of detective fiction than it does–but what it does have is golden.  James, like George and the the Golden Age writers of detective fiction (Sayers, Tey, Allingham, etc.) is a superb writer.   Her books “pull through” (as my choir director puts it for music.)    Detective fiction (or the broader category “mystery”)  is a good place to look at how “things going wrong” keep the reader attached to the story.   In the simplest, the detective lumbers along making wrong guesses until he (usually he) makes a right one…but the reader is allowed to know that the wrong guesses are wrong (sometimes when the suspect is the next person murdered.)   In the best, a competent but not perfect detective tried one intelligent thing after another in pursuit of the killer, and only the last (or a combination of several) finds the killer and prevents more deaths…and again, the reader sees the things going wrong and the final one going right.

In real life I am like anyone else–I don’t like it when things go wrong for me.  Whether it’s the headache, or the paperwork I can’t find, or a storm that knocks out power, or someone who doesn’t like me spreading gossip…I am human, and I don’t like it.    As a character once said in the comic Pogo,  when advised to just accept the ups and downs of life, “I don’t want ups and downs–I want ups and upper ups.”  Me, too.  Ups and upper ups forever!

But as a writer–as someone who wants to write good stories and then better ones–I know that “things going wrong” is where story lives and grows and may become great.   First of all, things going wrong create tension and suspense and keep readers glued to the story.  Second, things going wrong provide the impetus for characters to reveal more about themselves…when a snake comes in the back door, will the brash young man from the city scream in terror and run out the front, or will he prove himself as steady and competent as he wishes he were?   Third, will this thing going wrong connect with–make a pattern with–other story elements so that (like the cranky old car) it becomes both a foreshadowing and a mechanism for something greater?

I suspect (no proof) that it’s particularly important to connect the small things going wrong (which need to be there, for a rounded setting) to the big ones…that cranky car, the administrative glitch, the paper cut even.  We know that in real life little things can have outsized consequences, and having that happen in stories validates the reality of the setting and reminds us that every choice may count more than we thought.    Oversleep on the morning of 9/11…miss that flight…makes a huge difference.    Ordinarily, it’s an embarrassment, it costs you or your firm money to rebook, you may miss a birthday celebration or even a wedding, but that’s all.  But on one morning, missing a particular flight could save your life…and make everything you do with your life from then on seem more important.

Writers are always (or should be always) learning from life and from other writers how best to tell the stories that come to them.  (Like Robin McKinley, I think we’re sent particular stories that are ours to write.)    Though I can’t say I enjoyed the sleepless nights and short, uncomfortable naps of this past week–or the effect they had on wordage–I can say I’ve learned from the night-time reading of fantasy, mysteries, and autobiography.    And having learned some lessons, it’s now time for those miserable holes in my head known as sinuses to quit acting up, time for the click beetles to vanish, time for the other things keeping me awake to go away and let me get some sleep so the creative side of my brain will get back to work on Book IV.

And make sure plenty of things go wrong for the right reasons at the right time.