Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of writers about their writing processes, and specifically about why they do certain things. I’m always exceedingly bemused by the people who claim to put specific types of events or incidents or characters in their stories (or leave them out) for specific reasons that have little or nothing to do with the story they’re writing.
For instance, the writer who always ends her stories with last-minute justifications for the villain’s mass murder (“It was an accident” “The victims were actually zombies and he was preventing the Zombie Apocalypse”), because she “wants to show that even bad guys have reasons for what they do.” Or the writers who deliberately kill off the most appealing non-protagonist character in every novel “so the reader knows they can’t trust me.” Or the one whose protagonists were always seriously neglected or outright abused as a child “so readers will sympathize and identify with the character, even though the protagonist is better-stronger-faster-smarter at beyond-genius levels than any reader will ever be.”
This kind of thing used to drive me up a wall. I’ve mellowed a bit over the years, in part because I’ve realized that some of these writers don’t actually know why these things crop up over and over in their fiction. They’ve had to come up with a reason to give interviewers and/or inquisitive friends and colleagues, and this is what they’ve settled on. It’s the flip side of the readers who think that nearly everything in a story was deliberately constructed by the author as a sort of secret code that they’re supposed to uncover. (I blame English classes.)
Still, there are at least a few writers who are quite consciously and deliberately killing off characters, or marrying them off, or giving them terrible or wonderful backstories, because they are trying to prove something or demonstrate something to their readers. And I think that this is quite often (if not nearly always) both a mistake and unnecessary.
It’s a mistake because it only works if the thing the writer is throwing in “on principle” actually happens to fit the story (and even then, after two or three books it starts becoming really obvious that Really Nice Secondary Character X is going to die in mid-book, or that the not-conventionally-good-looking character is the one the protagonist is going to end up with instead of the rich beauty queen). Also, most writers don’t want to write only-slightly-different versions of the same story over and over, which means that sooner or later, they’re going to write something where the thing they always put in is not going to fit.
At that point, the writer has two choices: either they don’t kill off, justify, marry off, etc. their usual characters in their usual way because it isn’t right for the story, or else they try to warp the story to fit, which seldom ends well.
Far too many writers choose to “stick to their principles,” and end up floundering their way into a story that satisfies neither the writer nor their readers. And the worst of it is, it’s unnecessary.
The writer’s worldview – what the writer believes, deep in their soul, about how the world works; how people work; what’s right, what’s wrong; what’s important, what’s not; what can be justified, what can’t, and what constitutes sufficient justification – inevitably informs the stories the writer chooses to write and the way the writer writes them. As long as the writer trusts the story enough to stick with it, the things that the writer deeply believes in will get into that story, whether they’re “all men are created equal including women” or “nobody is a villain in their own eyes” or “the best fiction makes you think.”
The catch is that you can’t always tell from the outside whether a particular writer is justifying, killing off, marrying off, etc. their characters because they think they should (in order to show that bad guys are people, anybody can die at any moment, etc.), or whether the writer is doing it because it’s part of how they see the world.
Sometimes, the writers themselves aren’t sure why certain patterns keep showing up in their work. Sometimes, they don’t even notice until somebody asks about it, and they have to scramble to come up with a plausible answer.
The one thing that happens fairly consistently in my stories is a lack of compelling motivation for the characters; as often as not, they just want to get back home: the exiled king, the accidental stowaway on a pirate ship, the initiate on her walkabout/quest….
It worked for The Wizard of Oz, but I find it rather weak in the development of my own characters.
Amen. Nothing should be included without a reason.
I admit I don’t always know the reason when first including something, though!
In my stories there are tropes and elements and things that I always avoid (or paint black and hand to the villains when I can’t avoid them altogether) because I cordially dislike them. I don’t like reading about them, I don’t like writing about them, and I don’t want to inflict them on my readers.
There are also things I keep using not just because I like them but because I find them useful in avoiding the things I dislike. Finally there are things I keep using not because I particularly like them, but because I’ve fallen into a rut – and when I realize this, I make a deliberate effort to get out of the rut.
One of the things I dislike is when a misunderstanding drives the plot and puts the characters through a lot of avoidable grief. I once had a story-idea based on doing this, even though I hate it. I didn’t very far with it before deciding “No, I won’t do this. I’ll keep the opening up to the point of the misunderstanding, have the misunderstanding Not Happen, and come up with a completely different story-problem to drive the plot.” I’m glad I did. I like the story I actually wrote – certainly more that I would have liked the misunderstanding-driven story, even if I could have made myself complete it.
It can be real hard to see the forest for the trees as the writer.
I read a story that started out well and then devolved into a mess. The author had the heroes trapped underground, in the middle of an apocalypse with the god trying to kill then, the underground is erupting with lava and earthquakes the stairway is destroyed, above ground is destroyed, and the metal ladder has fallen down. the next scene they are alive in a spaceship with the reader having no idea who they got there. Unbelievable.
Deep Lurker: I absolutely DETEST stories where the whole plot is founded on a misunderstanding that a two-minute conversation could have prevented. I’ve found a lot of romances, in particular, seem to be based on this device.
Patricia, I hope that more authors pay attention to their habits and look at recurring situations in their books. I am an avid, VORACIOUS reader rather than an author but when I am writing a review, I try to stay aware of my language and avoid repeating adjectives! Using the same descriptive words every other sentence is quite annoying to read…as I have found in numerous books, as well!
I will add that if an author is doing things to let me know that I can’t trust them, then my usual response is to….stop reading books by that author. Especially when it’s about randomly killing off characters for no reason. I don’t have time for that garbage. So I feel that that is a strategy that can seriously backfire.