Hey! How do you defend a decision?
If you’re like me, there’s more than instinct behind this mess of molecules I call myself. At least, I like to pretend there’s a little logic.
A traceable path.
A believable story.
And a big part of that illusion of control comes from continuity.
That is to say, a coherent narrative of how I got from point A to point B.
That’s vague, I know.
That’s the point. These are basic shapes and outlines for now. I’ll fill it in a bit with a concrete example.
Something along these lines of:
I ate toast because there was bread in the kitchen and it tastes good.
Rather than:
I ate toast.
The end.
Purpose and Choice
There are creative ways to use the absence of explanations (ambiguity, surprise, surrealism, etc) but I wanted to explore a different direction this week.
I wanted to talk about the need for a reason.
A good reason to do anything at all.
There’s the obvious way this means having a justifiable position in, let’s say, a political argument, but the idea extends to every decision we make.
Surely, most of us feel the need to have more than random whim dictating everything in our lives.
It’s the same when writing a story.
And thus, unless the character is suffering some kind of delusion, a lack of clarity can come across as the writer not knowing what they’re doing.
These are the insults for stories without good reasons for their decisions:
Plot holes
Retcons
Contrivances
The classic symptoms of having no satisfying narrative from point A to point B.
Clarifying Commute
This need for consistent internal logic shows up in unexpected ways. At least it does for me. And so I generally classify things into two categories:
The overarching plot and what the whole story means.
The moment-to-moment logic and why characters act the way they do in a specific scene.
The long-term goal is catharsis while the short-term focus is consistency.
These don’t always align.
I.e. WHY DIDN’T THEY JUST USE THE EAGLES TO FLY TO MORDOR?!
Even if there is a good reason, it doesn’t stop memes. They spread, they overwrite, they become “acceptable criticism” in the mainstream.
In Significatorius, I’m discovering more of these moment-to-moment decisions that need further tuning as I proofread and edit. In many ways that makes perfect sense, I was focusing on the broader catharsis for my first drafts.
In fact, I’m going to be working on one of these issues seconds after sending out this newsletter.
For the handful of people who care, this is a mild spoiler. If you want to avoid that, just skip over the quoted text.
The discussion that follows should make sense whether you read it or not.
Yeshka led the charge of us getting more used to it. She was there every day for the commute to and from Ushpashun. And we needed to get used to it with Agum around. Jeong-uk and Ji-eun were letting him live in Nunbit Naru permanently now.
Out of context, there may be nothing obviously wrong. Maybe a stylistic tweak or two, but it’s otherwise a fine and serviceable paragraph, at worst.
However, there is something that slightly contradicts a plot thread I established in earlier chapters.
Oh, I hear your pleading voices.
What is this unbelievable oversight?
This unacceptable contradiction?
Well, the same commute mentioned in the quote is used as the reason why this character wasn’t present for a few scenes. And now here she is, seemingly with no outside pressure not to be.
No real explanation as to why, either.
It’s not indefensible or particularly unbelievable, but there isn’t exactly an explicitly stated good reason for that seemingly random change that goes unaccounted for.
So the question becomes:
Did I make a mistake?
Did I forget my own plot?
Or
Is there actually a good reason she’s there?
The answer:
Of course there’s a totally reasonable, well-thought-out excuse for her to be there!
Or rather
I’ll make damn sure you believe there always was.
And that is where a lot of people will either lie and hide or lie and laugh about it. How I think about it though, is that there are always believable ways to have a story and its characters make sense.
I enjoy the challenge of making it all fit together.
For this specific case, I’ve actually had the idea in my head that Yeshka could stay longer. It makes sense since they are already at her pickup point.
From there it’s a matter of making it fit the page and feel natural. Maybe she decided to exceptionally take a later ride home because she doesn’t need to worry about missing the last boat.
But to say that was my original intention or that I always had it that way in my head would be untrue.
I suppose I’ll need to mull over whether revealing this dulls the impact of the character.
Retroactive Reactions
Let me ask you something:
Would you prefer thinking the writer was a megamind genius who had every character and their arc planned and plotted from day one?
Or are you okay with a little improvisation, as long as it all makes sense and sounds good in the end?
Personally, I think the idea of “immaculate conception” in storytelling is a dangerous one. At the very least, it’s discouraging.
Creativity is a process. Nothing arrives fully formed.
We refine it.
We rewrite it.
We reshape it.
As long as the story maintains that vaunted suspension of disbelief to the very last page, it doesn’t really matter how all the pieces got there.
Perhaps it’s something else for you, or perhaps this is not even something you’ve ever really thought about.
Whatever the case may be, I’d genuinely like to hear what you have to say.
Until next time.
—JMB
After I finished Significatorius and let it percolate, I started thinking “wait a minute, which character was the significator and why.” I have to go back and read the last few chapters.