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

[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.