Watcha red card...

Last week I discussed general principles of plotting and stressed that plot arises from action, and that action arises from character.  Thus, if you know your characters, plotting is made much easier.  This week I will discuss an element of storytelling dear to my heart and much ignored in modern fiction: playing fair.

By this I mean playing fair with the audience.  This means, simply, that you lay all your narrative cards on the table.  Withholding information from characters is a choice made for narrative reasons, and is acceptable, but withholding information from the reader is a cheat, and only inferior art can come from it.

We recognize this, in broad terms anyway.  We now have contempt for the deus ex machina ending - where someone we have never met before turns up and fixes all the character's problems.  Few modern examples of this endure, and even the arrival of King Richard at the end of a Robin Hood movie is often played now more for tradition than anything else.

But there are degrees of this, and it is now almost fashionable to have a story which derives its energia from withheld information.  Think of the common fascination with "twist" endings - originally made popular by Twilight Zone, where it was used effectively for purposes of satire, where such gimmicks can be used.  But then it became a standard tactic of mystery writers, which cemented the twist ending as "clever" when it is nothing of the sort.  Fooling the reader when you hold all the cards doesn't prove anything.

And anyway, we are not engaged in a contest, we get no bonus points for fooling anyone.  This is fictional drama, and drama depends on characters forced to make difficult decisions.  In order for this to occur, it must be made plain what is happening and what is at stake.  This cannot be done if the audience is in the dark about the players and the play.

The truth is that stories that rely on withheld information to maintain interest are inferior to those which lay everything out and then make their characters deal with it.  All the cards are face up, and you know what everyone is doing.  This makes the act of reading not about learning secrets or solving stupid puzzles, but about character and feeling, about what the characters are doing and why.

This is my major complaint about Harry Potter as a series, because Rowling is very bad about this.  She hides information from the characters - which is acceptable - but she hides it from us as well, and that is a lame excuse for drama.  Once you have read a story like this, then you know the secrets and never go back and read it again.  Your characters are never as deep as they could be, because they never make hard decisions, and your drama is diluted by the fact that we only find out after the fact what has been going on.

It is hard to let go, hard to resist the urge to surprise the audience, to pull off a big "reveal".  People clap their hands to their ears and screech "spoilers!" if you discuss something they have not read or seen.  But a real drama does not depend on surprise for its impact.  Sophie's titular Choice is not made any less devastating by foreknowledge of what she does and what comes of it.

If characters are well-drawn, then we identify with them, and when they are forced into a hard decision we feel it - the warring emotions and arguments, the pros and the cons, the many layers there are to any hard choice - we feel it as if it were us, forced into that corner.  Don't hobble all that for the transient and boorish urge to jump out and yell "surprise!"

Next Week: Villainy