It is ironic that in these days of instant messaging so many plots still depend on two or more central characters not communicating effectively with each other. OK, a lot of pre-Internet stories depend on someone missing a phone call or a messenger, but at least someone was trying to let them know that the ransom note was a trap.
Now you get stories in which a supposedly adult person cannot manage to sit down and discuss plot-vital information with another key player, because that would short-circuit the plot. It happens in Romance novels when a ten minute discussion in Chapter 3 would clear up the imaginary obstacles that each person thinks stand in the way of their relationship, but said discussion never takes place. It happens in mystery novels and thrillers when a key character decides not to reveal some “unimportant (but embarrassing) detail,” only to have that detail be the key to unraveling the murder/plot. It happens in adventure stories when a mentor provides the hero with vague directions for some specious reason, such as “you had to figure it out for yourself” or “it was to help you grow into your abilities.”
The author then has to justify the lack of communication. For centuries, a problem with timing was all you needed—the messenger got there late, the letter arrived too late to help—because communicating over even local distances took a lot of time. Then came phones, which reduced the value of timing (it’s not as believable to have someone missing a vital phone call for three days running as it is to have the messenger delayed for three days by a washed-out bridge). As answering machines and cell phones made “I didn’t get your message” more and more unbelievable, the justifications for not-talking and missing information shifted to character-based issues.
Character-based justifications for poor communication usually boil down to either a reluctance or a deliberate refusal to talk due to the character’s insecurities, traumatic background, fear, mistrust, or just plain obliviousness. To put it another way: characters don’t exchange critical information because they don’t want to look foolish in front of the other person, because they dislike or distrust the other person (due to issues in their past which cause one of them to misjudge the other, or to previous interactions between the two of them that lead them each to misinterpret the other’s motives), because they’re afraid of the consequences of revealing the information, or because they think everyone else already knows and/or don’t realize it’s critical information.
These days, using characters’ personal issues and traits is the most common way of justifying two characters not exchanging critical information as soon as they have it. The trouble is that if two characters are withholding important information from one another because of character-related issues, those issues have to, at minimum, be consistent. It doesn’t work to have two characters who are perfectly capable of exchanging critical information in the first five or six chapters, but suddenly stop doing so in Chapter Eight because of trust issues that should have affected things right from the start. Likewise, two characters who have been going at each other tooth and claw (or carefully avoiding each other) for the first half of the book aren’t going to suddenly start telling each other important personal-and-plot information in mid-book, just because the author needs them to do so.
About the only place where this kind of behavior works is in YA and Teen fiction. Most readers understand a teenager having poor communication skills, especially when talking to adults. (“How was your day?” “OK.” “What did you do?” “Nothin’.” is practically a universal stereotype). It’s also believable for teenagers to have all sorts of issues around embarrassing revelations, social insecurities, admitting mistakes or trauma, just plain inexperience, and not going to adults for help. YA and Teen fiction readers (who are not all teenagers or younger) also tend to accept that the adults in a story are incompetent, justifying the teens’ desire to avoid talking to them.
In almost all other sorts of fiction, papering over we-just-didn’t-bother-to-talk-about-it plot holes seldom works. By “papering over,” I mean that the author tries to distract readers from the problem with a flurry of intense action, or by inserting a major viewpoint change or time skip and then claiming that the original POV character worked through all their issues off-stage. This kind of thing may be better than nothing, but not by much.
Properly patching a poor-communication plot hole requires three things: first, there has to be a good, solid, plausible reason for the lack of communication; second, that reason has to be overcome in time for the plot to play out the way it is supposed to (this can be “just in time for the heroes to win” in a normal action-adventure, or “right after the heroes lose” in a grimdark tragedy), and finally, the poor communication needs to have consequences in addition to the resolution of the action plot (that is, the characters need to recognize that they’ve had a problem and attempt to [or at least resolve to] correct it).
One of the simplest ways of doing this is to make the communication issues a significant subplot. Usually, this means that the character(s) who have insecurities, trust issues, etc. are forced to recognize and deal with their problem(s) over the course of the story, but it can also mean that the character refuses to deal with it, and some other character has to discover the key bit of information in the nick of time…resulting in the action plot coming to a successful conclusion, but the relationship between the non-communicative character and the rest of the main characters being severely damaged. Character-centered writers often find one of these options comes naturally—in fact, sometimes these writers end up making the characters’ difficulties in communicating the primary plotline, with the action elements relegated to First Major Subplot.
Then there’s always the person with the key information just doesn’t care, either about the info or the protagonist. I didn’t see this happen too often – but when it did, that was too often. (I could write an autobiography called Thirty Years in Bureaucracy, but I don’t want to write it any more than you want to read it.)
That works best in horror.
Something that works for now in current/near-future works is automated phone systems/AI. Having an AI take the emergency call and then give a hallucinatory answer ought to do…
I’m not super familiar with either horror or science fiction, so I have a question: why would an AI give a hallucinatory answer? (Am I even sure I know what hallucinatory means? Dictionary, here I cometh!)
Regarding Artificial Intelligence (the natural language kind), a hallucination is a response (usually an answer to a question) that has no basis in reality.
While natural-language AIs appear to understand what they ae saying, what they generate is really just a string of (to them) unrelated words that fit a pattern they have been trained in. That it works as well as it does (most of the time) is impressive, but when it doesn’t work (as in hallucinating), it isn’t necessarily at all obvious.
Well put, Wolf!
Maybe it’s a result of my parents watching too many Hallmark movies, but this sort of plot-hinges-on-bad-communication trope bugs the heck out of me. It is probably one of my biggest pet peeves in writing, whether it’s done well or not. (The only time I can see it justified is if the characters are both suddenly WAY busier than usual and don’t get a chance to make the phone call or have the talk in time, which totally happens in real life… and even then I think you’d have to be careful, because texting still exists.) I believe that insecurities are not really that good an excuse to hide what you really think.
Then again, I am an incredibly bluntly honest person. If I feel strongly about something, I’ll spend a couple minutes thinking about it to try and inject some tact into it so I don’t TOTALLY cause offense, and then go spit it out.
There are other ways miscommunication can happen in addition to missed calls & such, right? Making it simple, there are two parties, sender and receiver. If the two know each other very well, miscommunication is less likely to happen b/c both know each other’s voice, habits, eccentricities. But if the two are not intimate, there’s a lot that can go wrong in the communication, both verbal and written.
In the case of written, there may be a significant disparity between the two’s abilities. Someone may write a very exacting note of great length to a person who can’t read well enough to follow instructions to escape from a wet paper bag if spotted a spork. Reversed, a note that was grammatically ambiguous or incoherent.
Spoken communication can also be jumbled. This happens in real life when one person whose intimates know is a joker, or likes sarcasm, and the other who doesn’t know him as well doesn’t know this about the speaker. What’s sent as a joke is received as serious.
Well known references to one may be ambiguous or unknown to the other. I.e., “meet me at the substation at noon.” To one, SubStation is a fast food joint. To another, a substation of the electric company. The substation is out in the country, no SubStations any where. Give up. Go home.
If there are more than two parties and info needs to be passed along a chain, it’s the old telephone gossip game. Each person adds or subtracts seemingly irrelevant bits, but the final story is not same as the initial story.
I think there was some of what I’m talking about in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
There might be another subcategory: confusion — as when the characters *think* they’re providing the information, but it’s misunderstood. Plays well into comedy. I wrote one story in which the MC thought she’d figured something out, and thought she’d heard it confirmed, but it wasn’t quite what she thought it was. To make the continuing misunderstanding plausible, though, I had to keep the conditions very tightly controlled: the story is only novella-length, and the whole thing takes place during less than a week’s time. Any longer, and plausibility would have suffered, since the longer things went on, the greater the probability that the truth would have come out by chance.
Another problem is that a plot turning on misinformation doesn’t progress well. I read one where the hero and heroine had excellent reasons to not talk and as a consequence the story was distinctly static.
This can be improved by having one character mislead another for a reason that seems sufficient at the time. Then, as the scale of the problem rises, the character is constantly facing more consequences for telling the truth NOW.
But it’s still better to have the truth come out and send the plot off in another direction. (Misleading is good there, too. “How could you LIE to me?”)
Cultural differences could also be the cause of miscommunication. Think of a fantasy where a modern Westerner meets one of the fae. The Westerner says ‘I promise to do X’. They think they’ve agreed to make reasonable efforts to do X assuming no sufficiently important reason not to comes along. (Or, if the Westerner is a less responsible person, they may not even attach that much weight to their promise.) The fae now thinks they’re committed to doing X at all costs and will die trying if necessary.
This particular culture gap has its own set of tropes and any moderately genre-savvy character knows to avoid it, but there are plenty of other ways two people from different cultures could misunderstand each other, even if they both believe they’re being honest.
Addendum: I’ve only ever seen the fae-promise trope used as a way to demand things of the mortal. You could write a tragicomedy where the mortal says something like ‘promise you won’t come back without my chocolates’ to the faerie, and the faerie then staggers in half dead hours later with the chocolates. Even though the mortal wouldn’t want them to keep the promise if it meant physical injury.
In my martial arts school we learned the Japanese for “yes” on day 1 and used it constantly. We did not learn the word for “no.” One doesn’t say no to one’s superiors. This means other ways have to be found to get the information across. (Being Westerners we just said “no” in English: it was rude, but rudeness is somewhat expected from Westerners….)
This led to a nasty affair when a Japanese lab tech was asked about his involvement with some spoiled samples, and did not feel free to say no, he wasn’t involved. He ended up in court, because the Westerners questioning him took his forced yes at face value.
Japanese has a word for “no”? I’d heard it didn’t even exist!
いいえ (pronounced iie) is a polite and formal way to say “no”. In casual speech, “no” can also be expressed as いや (iya) or ううん (uun).
The most-common “no” I’ve heard tell in Japanese is “That would be difficult”: それは難しいでしょう (Sore wa muzukashii deshō).
Whoaaa! That’s super cool! 🙂
My fellow students and me got rather good at saying “hai” (yes) in ways that communicated how eager we actually were. Sensei very well knew the difference between “hai!” meaning “we’d love to do that!” and a muttered “hai” meaning “if you insist, but we’d really rather not.”
Sometimes she did insist. I loved my dojo, sadly no longer in operation due to the pandemic, but it was one of the most authoritarian systems I’ve ever been part of, and I did get to see what that’s like if your superiors aren’t as decent as she was. Ended up delaying my black belt test by a year or so because I said privately to sensei, I will not do it under the regional head instructor. His aikido is superb but he is a bully. In Japan I would not have been able to say this, and would probably just have had to get bullied. Really brought home the cultural differences.
Also the fancy dinner where I said privately to sensei, “I’m exhausted, can I go back to the hotel?” and she said somewhat bitterly, “Yes, you can. I can’t though.”
Yes! We have no bananas.
(very old song)
I think one of the very few times I’ve seen the ‘miscommunication’/not communicating thing work was in some drama I was watching not long ago. Pre-phone era, so messages took time. But the characters came together, freely shared information and all was good, until the hero was called away for plot A. Heroine meanwhile learns VERY important details about plot B, and immediately runs to find him – only to find he’s left an hour earlier. She tries to leave him a message, but is told he won’t be back for (however many) days. She then has to deal with things herself. He comes back, but things are at a head and they don’t get to meet up until ‘bad things start happening’. She manages to stop part of it, and he catches wind and rushes in to help finish it. Then comes the whole “Why didn’t you tell me?!” To which she could honestly say she TRIED, but learned about it too late, and then he was gone and she couldn’t tell him until that minute. More chaos ensues and she looks over and asks “are we good?” and he nods and says ‘we’re good’ and they rejoin up to stop the bad plot from happening.
I mean, it was simple. It employed the trope of them doing their own things, and a bit of miscommunication going on, but it also had a valid reason and was QUICKLY cleared up and dealt with as soon as they had a moment to meet up and talk again. I could have cheered as it was a good way to use the trope, if one was going to use it. And it worked. The story was interesting, fast pace, the two separate ‘threads’ of the story where they split made sense, then wove back in. Not saying it didn’t have other issues, but that one was well handled – and didn’t drag it on an insufferably long time to have the audience groaning in frustration.
I’m sure there are other good ways to use it too without driving everyone else up the wall with the idiocy – but this is one of the few that I’ve seen actually deploy it decently. It also wasn’t dragged out for 90% of the story. It was just a brief point towards the end.
Another way of doing it is one I use all the time, although it’s usually unstated. Along the lines of, “If I tell them what I learned through my telepathy/being from a parallel world/astral travels I’ll end up a laboratory subject for the rest of my life.”
Giving characters information they have to be extremely careful about sharing and even using adds a level of conflict that’s fun to work with (for me).
Plots driven by failures of communication are… not my favorite.
That ‘human woman goes shopping for clothes on an alien planet’ story of mine was originally going to have a plot driven by a miscommunication. Then I decided that No. I Will Not Do That – and so I came up with a different story-problem to drive the plot.
Yeah, if anyone is going to go with miscommunication as their plot key, maybe go with horror, or humor.
“But I thought you said to save the damsel in *this* dress!”
Hello Mrs. Wrede,
I just wanted to leave you this comment as I am about to finish your wonderful book, “Book of Echantments” and was delighted to stumble upon this blog of yours after Googling your name. I truly enjoyed every story you wrote and am inspired to write the book I always dreamed of writing as a young girl (I am now 22 years old). I wish you and your loved ones good health and happiness. Thank you 🙂