Writing plot that doesn't seem fake

[jack]

This is something that is likely obvious to other people but appeared in my head and I couldn't easily put into words.

Often, when plot happens in a book, it feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere. It feels like (and maybe was) that the author had written a note that at that point "then the main characters have a big argument" or "then the assassins guild attack them". And then that's what happens. Even if it feels out of character or doesn't make sense with what happened before.

But if instead, I think of it as, "X resents Y for foo but doesn't admit it as long as bar" and "Y thinks X is bad at baz but doesn't want to say so" and "the assassins guild put a bounty on them but have't found them yet", then that typically shows through in previous scenes, naturally creating some amount of factual or thematic foreshadowing.

Like, instead of the current status quo being a natural peaceful state and each plot development being instigated by a new impetus, imagine the status quo is an equilibrium between many opposing forces, both internal to the character (what they want to do, what they're scared of) and external (other factions, things that will likely go wrong, etc). And then every event occurs naturally if you just knock the situation off balance a bit, without needing to contrive new forces of motion.

Also, if the characters have a smaller number of motivations they pursue through many situations, it feels more like a whole plot instead of a series of coincidences.

Roleplaying

If anything, that's probably even more important in roleplaying, and was the way I was thinking of roleplaying scenarios even if I didn't put it in those terms. If you have an overall force pushing the players towards the main antagonist (revenge, macguffin, curiosity, he's hunting them down, whatever), and a force pushing them away (typically, "he's too tough"), then the scenario will likely end up with a big showdown somewhere even if it goes off the rails at every intermediate point. If the momentum is already in that direction, it's easy to improvise some of the details, e.g. they don't know where he is, all you need to do is drop an appropriate clue.

But if you don't have existing motivation shared and understood by the players (often subconsciously), then every event feels tacked on, with the players constantly looking for clues what they're "supposed" to do.

Caveats

Obviously, this is just a way of thinking, it's not actually a solution. And even if you do show problems coming they can feel fake: you repeatedly show a characters' anger, but the reader doesn't accept it and is shocked when it bubbles out of control; or you repeatedly reference the risk of death from something, but without even small consequences, it doesn't feel "real" and when it actually kills someone, it feels "unfair".

Comments

[seekingferret]

Harry Keeler is a lunatic but he has this amazing conceptual framework for thinking about this that he writes about in "The Mechanics (And Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction".

His language is that there are two techniques in creating plot, which he calls 'motiving' and 'motivating'. In 'motiving', you want a certain plot event to happen, so you design your characters to have motives that will get them to that point. In 'motivating', you want your character to have a certain motivation, and then you extrapolate out what the character will do based on the motivation to get your plot. Both can feel unnatural in different situations, so you need to balance them... then again, Keeler doesn't really seem to worry that much about it feeling unnatural, his books have a manic energy that comes of so many plot things happening that you don't have time to think about how there is a hand behind them.

[jack]

Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, the motiving/motivating is a great way to think about it: I'd noticed I was often torn between things being consistent and getting to an outcome I wanted to reach, but I hadn't thought of it as explicitly balancing between them until I read that.

[edrith.co.uk]

I found the premise of this really fascinating. For me, it's rare to feel that 'plot comes out of nowhere in a book' - unless it's a really bad book, I usually find it quite easy to suspend disbelief and be convinced by the narrative. Maybe we read books quite differently? Do you often remain quite detached and analytical when reading them?

On roleplaying, I think the best comparison is not to a book (or film) but to a TV series with an overarching story arc but also individual episodes, such as Babylon 5, Stargate or The West Wing. In that it's much stronger if there's an overall arc, and individual episodes will often either move it forward or at least take place in the context of it, but each episode needs to be satisfying in its own right and it's ok for some episodes to be primarily about things other than the arc, such as character development or even just enjoyably showing a bit more of the world. This also allows you as a GM to keep a clear sense of purpose and overall direction to the campaign while allowing the players a lot freedom at the immediate level.

[jack]

Do you often remain quite detached and analytical when reading them?

That's a good question. I think it's increasingly common. I don't INTEND to, if anything, I would rather just get wrapped up in them at face value. But the more books I've read, the more I'm consciously or subconsciously aware of sudden patterns, and even small things that interrupt suspension of disbelief make me suddenly notice the "what's likely to happen".

It still seems that I'm often less aware than other people, though: I often find myself enjoying a story and interested to see how it ends, when someone else found the ending obvious because of the structure of the story, not so much the things in the story.

But what I'm talking about here, I'm not sure it comes from being more detached. I think it's more what happens when you are wrapped up in a story, but it doesn't flow right. I think casual watchers, or children, etc, are just as likely to experience these problems. But if you're naturally wrapped up in the story, you tend to interpret that as the story being boring, or out of character, or as a plot hole, or some other criticism, and may not be aware that honestly, all those things happened lots of other times but you just didn't really get hung up on them because the story *felt* right. Whereas if you're more detached you're more likely to become completely detached at that point.

I think of suspending disbelief more as "being forgiving of inconsistencies, contradictions, or things you don't like, in order to enjoy a good story" and this more as NOT being a good story. But it does vary because most holes bother some people and not others.

But I admit, now I'm interested that you say you usually DON'T notice these problems. I don't know why that is.

[edrith.co.uk]

I like your definition of suspending disbelief and it being different from the phenomenon you're speaking of. And yes, I agree about it sometimes mattering more than others (and differently to different people).

I suspect this may be a matter of degree. It's not that I don't recognise the scenarios you're describing, it's more that I would have said, "Occasionally, when plot happens..." whereas you wrote, "Often, when plot happens...". And I do sometimes assess what I think is going to happen in plot/genre terms (and notably some of the most shocking events are when this is subverted, such as the Red Wedding), but for some reason I generally seem to see the plot as legitimate whilst I'm reading it, even if I might feel differently if I was discussing it with someone level.

[jack]

Ah, good question. I'm not sure exactly how often. I guess, it's a problem that's often there a little bit, but the times when it happens badly stick in my memory a lot more.

"I generally seem to see the plot as legitimate whilst I'm reading it"

Now I think about it, I think what I'm talking about is things that *break* suspension of disbelief. This really does vary a lot between people. I don't *intend* to be analytical, but it seems like I'm more likely to be jolted by one of those things than you are.

To some extent, I guess some people are just naturally more inclined to roll with things. If a character suddenly starts acting differently, or if some gadget can do something that was never mentioned before, some people get hung up on it, and some people just accept that as the way things are now. But you can't just completely accept things. Accepting "how things are" is based on cues from the book -- not consciously processed, but from the dialogue, the tone, and the facts, communicating "these characters are in trouble now" or "they're angry at each other". And lots of response to the book can only appear by the reader having a model in their head of how they expect a character or gadget to act, or they have no way to judge what's an important occurrence, but if you have that at all, you must sometimes be jarred by things not meeting it.

I don't mean like a critic reviewing a film, I mean more like a child saying, "Character X wouldn't do a bad thing like that" or "Character Y can't die, it's not fair", because they don't expect characters to just die.

Often this depends on some sort of shared assumption -- importantly, it doesn't have to be CORRECT, but you need SOME model of, for instance, "the bad guy has a gun, they're dangerous", even if it's completely different to a real-life model, and if you don't you won't know when to be scared for the hero and when you won't.

My original post was about avoiding those moments, like when a scene is supposed to be tense but isn't, because the author intended the reader to feel the hero's in danger but the reader doesn't. But I guess if you rarely experience those, then it makes much less difference. Even if I think the same techniques typically do help a reader be engrossed, even if the failure to do so isn't an obvious one. Like I said before, of it "not working" often doesn't translate to the reader spotting the problem, but just getting bored and not caring.

[jack]

Now I wish I had some more concrete examples, but I always have difficulty thinking of them.

Let's pick an example. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This is a book where the war against Voldemort gets serious, and it repeatedly reinforces the idea that they are in a serious, adult, conflict, and that people are at actual risk of death, not "it's dangerous, but it will turn out ok in the end because it's a story" like the books when Harry was younger.

Several different aspects potentially contribute to the tension of worrying about a character dying. It's usually hard to verbalise these, but I've been thinking about them.

One is that, Rowling talked about it before the book came out, I think she said a major character did die or was likely to die. It's a risk sharing something like that, but for me it worked very well -- even after several false alarms of moments in the book when it looked like someone might be dead and it turned out they weren't, I didn't get jaded, because I knew the next one was likely to be a real death after all.

Others are normal to most books -- the physical situation, are they in danger? the tone of the scene, is it building tension, are the characters worried something might happen?

That meant several times I was really scared for the characters, when usually I'm not even if the book says that a situation is scary.

But towards the end of the book, there's a big event which is SUPPOSED to be really scary but for was really sabotaged by a small mistake. Sirius gave Harry a mirror saying, "if you need to contact me, use the mirror. And we're reminded of that shortly before the scene. Then Harry needs to contact him urgently, and doesn't even think to use the mirror (either he forgot, or it wouldn't work for some reason). And the plot evolves from there. But I was really distracted, because both my factual knowledge and genre awareness were telling me this mirror was supposed to be important, so it seemed like what was ACTUALLY happening mustn't be consequential somehow. It's not that there's anything wrong as such, but it's never addresses "oh no, I forgot" or "oh, I tried it and it didn't work." That's the sort of thing I'm trying to avoid.

Now I talk about it, I realise that once they hared off on their mission, I realised I'd misunderstood, and should have adjusted my understanding to believe they were all in danger even though it seemed like they shouldn't be. I think that's something idiosyncratic about my reading. But there's plenty of other times where the cues that the reader has latched onto the wrong thing come too late to clear the supposedly-dramatic scene.

[edrith.co.uk]

That's a really good example from Order of the Phoenix. I agree with all of your points about how she builds up the tension and reality of danger (plus one I'd add is that at the end of Goblet of Fire, Cedric dies. He's a lot less important than Sirius, but it establishes the precedent that in this children's series, characters can die mid-series which is a big line to cross). I don't think I was jarred in the same way as you by the mirror, but can understand how you were.


Your description of the mental model makes a lot of sense. I think I share a lot of your reading in terms of 'but character wouldn't do X' but manage to put my genre savviness to sleep a bit more whilst actually reading. I do notice that there are books you've recommended which I didn't read for a while because your reviews tend to focus on quite meta issues (e.g. balance of gender and (real-world) races, relevance to real-life societal issues) rather than whether it's a good story, which I found interesting but led me to wonder if there was much point in actually reading the book after having read the review - but actually when I did it was a really good story with great characters and so forth. So it makes sense that we do engage with them slightly differently.

Two slight digressions but on this theme:
- An author not setting up these expectations definitely causes problems too. One reason I found Raising Steam so unsatisfying (of course, I recognize the challenging circumstances in which it was written) was that it never made me believe there was any genuine threat to the protagonists. Some of Eddings' later books do this too.
- In the book I've written and the (part-finished) sequel, one of the things I've tried to do is leave deliberate ambiguity as to whether the objects of religious belief are real or not (or could be explained by magic/coincidence). So I'm trying to deliberately write in a way which is consistent with two different mental models of the world, which is sometimes tricky.

[jack]

your reviews tend to focus on quite meta issues

I think that's my reviews not the way I read :) If I bother to write about it at all, it was usually interesting/engaging and that had the biggest impression on my enjoyment as I was reading it, but somehow I just always fail to get any of that into the post in any way which might be useful to people who haven't already read it.

I'm interested to know which ones you have tried/enjoyed.

it never made me believe there was any genuine threat to the protagonists

Yeah, that's a great example of what I was trying to talk about. That the author had an idea of what should happen (protagonists face danger, overcome it), but even though they SAID there was danger, that never really came across to the reader.

leave deliberate ambiguity as to whether the objects of religious belief are real or not

That's an example where ambiguity can work well, since it can naturally be unknown and the readers and the characters can be in a similar position. Although it can end up with the reader having a very different idea than the author expected, which can turn out very well or very badly depending.

[edrith.co.uk]

I think it was A Natural History of Dragons and possibly The Three Body Problem. Both were excellent.

[jack]

think the best comparison is not to a book (or film) but to a TV series with an overarching story arc but also individual episodes,

That's a good analogy, at least for the most common sort of campaign with regular sessions. I think should work exactly as you say. But I think the mechanics of having a good arc (either the overall arc or the individual episode/session arc) are the same for many types of stories, both in what makes them feel good, and that in roleplaying they need to be flexible enough that they turn out well when the players may do many different things and you don't often know which.