Maybe if I say it often enough, I'll start to believe it.

[truepenny]

Trying to keep secrets does not improve the story.

Really.

This doesn't mean your characters have to spill their guts the first time they walk on-stage--I find, especially with first-person narrators, that it adds to the sense of verisimilitude if they have things they don't want to talk about. You know, like real people do.

But there's a difference between that and things that you as the author are hiding because ...

Well, because ...

Because they're so clever.

::facepalm::

This is the rationale behind every protagonist is really a vampire! story ever written. Also ones where the protagonist turns out to be dead or insane or the murderer (pace Agatha Christie) or Adam or any other last-line twist ending you care to cite. And it's why twist endings are cheats, more often than not, because the author has gotten so wrapped up in being clever that they've forgotten about making the story worthwhile. (I, too, have written a protagonist is really a vampire! story, so, you know, I'm throwing stones at my own glass house here.) Clever can't carry you far, unless you're Saki or O. Henry (and notice that they both keep their stories very short). It's great out of the gate, but fades before it reaches the first turn.

So a story had damn well better have something more than clever going for it.

Now, I have gotten past the stage of thinking the twist ending is the brightest thing since chrome, but I seem to be having more than a little trouble with relinquishing the idea that the cleverer and more shiny an idea is, the longer the delay should be before it gets explained. I struggled with this throughout my academic career (as heresluck will remember vividly), and I'm still struggling with it in my fiction.

Like wrestling a bunyip.

I've been listening to the two Moulin Rouge! soundtrack albums a lot the past week or so, because it's a weirdly apt intertext for The Mirador,* and I think it's actually a good exemplar for me to keep in mind. Baz Luhrmann does not hide even a scrap of that movie's light under a bushel. We're barely launched before we're well aware that this is going to be a love story, a tragedy, as meta as fuck, and, oh yes, if we hadn't had the word "anachronism," Baz Luhrmann would have had to invent it. But (and I'm only speaking for myself of course) the wild delight at hearing "The Sound of Music" so grossly misappropriated does not dim in the slightest the wild delight at the equally wild misappropriation of "Like a Virgin" (which is what I'm listening to right at this second). He doesn't lose anything by showing his hand. Because it isn't a card game and it isn't a game of oneupmanship. The idea is for the author to get the reader on the novel's side, and you can't do that by playing pointless head games.

It's completely different if the head games have a purpose, and that's not what I'm talking about. There are all kinds of thematic reasons to withhold information--Bone Dance is the best example I can think of off the top of my head--and if you have a purpose, then it's a different ballgame. I'm talking about withholding information for no better reason than because you can.

That's just stupid.

And it's something I'm going to have to undo for the next draft of The Mirador.


---
*Back when I was still toying with having epigraphs for these books, the epigraph for The Mirador was, in fact, from Moulin Rouge!: We're creatures of the underworld. We can't afford to love.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

Do your characters ever hide stuff from you until you are halfway done with something? Because mine do.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I've been working on this book since '98. Saturday, one of my characters finally 'fessed up to something that, in retrospect, I should have had figured out five years ago at least.

So, um, yes.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Attacharacter. Who are we, to think we're gods, that we're entitled to know all of their secrets?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Oh, what was that? You can tell me in email if it's a spoilerrrrrr.

[cleverthylacine]

That's a great relief. Was it Mildmay? (Of course you needn't say, but he strikes me as the sort who might do that.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Actually, it wasn't. It was The Mirador's other narrator.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

This is the rationale behind every protagonist is really a vampire! story ever written.

Oh. Even Agyar? Because I thought that worked out really well.

I am also a fan of not having your characters spill their guts every which way. Dribble the information out while the reader's looking the other way! More fun that way. (Of course, I have recently been reading a whole string of "cozy" village murder mysteries whose narrators have dire lay-bare-your-heart tendencies.)

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

In Agyar, the word "vampire" is never used. The reader is assumed to have the knowledge needed to figure it out.

I can think of stories in which the title gave away what was going to happen -- and it worked. Of course, not all readers of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin were trad-folk buffs. And there just might have been a few readers of Lord Dunsany's "The Castle Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" who didn't anticipate that someone would show up at the Castle with Sacnoth.

Note: There are mysteries in which no character ever tells the detective or the reader who dunnit. For example, in about half of Joyce Porter's Inspector Dover novels, the culprit is never caught. But the reader knows, even though Dover never figures it out.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Fortress.

Just correcting you to be polite.

I adore the bit where he gets to the door, and the doorkeeper says "Go away, this is the Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth!" and he says "This is Sacnoth," and everyone runs away.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

And it's why twist endings are cheats, more often than not, because the author has gotten so wrapped up in being clever that they've forgotten about making the story worthwhile.

Yup, that's fundamental: being clever is never enough, it's not what fiction is about. Anything that ends up simply as a demonstration that the author is cleverer than you - or thinks they are - is a waste of time. Story is about growth, discovery, all of that good stuff, not cocking a snook. Which is why I can't read Agatha Christie (not novels, more like crossword puzzles; I enjoy puzzles, but the rationale is different) or John Fowles (tiresome parade of ego, utterly ungenuine in its engagement with the characters). But I love Dorothy L Sayers, who wrote real novels (eventually) that happened to have a mystery structure.

But:

Baz Luhrmann ... doesn't lose anything by showing his hand. Because it isn't a card game and it isn't a game of oneupmanship. The idea is for the author to get the reader on the novel's side, and you can't do that by playing pointless head games.

Umm. Doesn't it work here because the Baz Luhrmann is a movie, rather than a novel? I agree with you utterly about Moulin Rouge, but I think we engage with it completely differently, in a way that allows self-conscious cleverness that would be counterproductive on paper. This is, I confess, a bugbear of mine (I have been known to sit at a table of film-class aficionados and say 'Yes, but books matter, where movies don't' - which I think is exemplified by the nature of film classes, but they'll never listen). However, in brief: watching a movie is essentially a passive experience, the decisions are all made for you, you're not engaged with the creative process and so you're set up for being impressed/amused/astounded by all the referential, anachronistic stuff they fling in, and they have to make a parade of it because there is no scope for mystery. A soundtrack is a soundtrack, and cannot be finessed. The experience of reading a novel is so different, you-the-reader are so much a part of the process, any mindfucking on the part of the author is inherently intrusive and so corrosive, it's a breach of contract. You can have unreliable narrators, but an unreliable author is another thing altogether.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I think there's a level of storytelling that applies to both. (I use movies to illustrate points about writing and storytelling all the time--because they are shorter, and the narrative is perforce simpler, they come in handy. They get their richness (the good ones) in other ways--layering, and visuals, and acting, and subtext.

But that's neither here nor there. Narrative cheating is narrative cheating, and if you want to know what I mean, go watch the modern remake of Oceans 11 and then watch Oceans 12.

The second one cheats. It conceals something important about the caper plot until the end. The first one gives you all the information you need, and doesn't explain it.

That's an unreliable author, in movie terms. Agatha Christie cheats too, and in similar ways, which is why I won't read her.

You can also have an unreliable narrator in a movie--The Usual Suspects.

(And I dunno if you've ever sat down and had an argument with a group of people who've had completely different experiences of a movie because they read the subtext differently, but I have.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You can also have an unreliable narrator in a movie--The Usual Suspects.

Whoo, yeah. Or Reservoir Dogs, which is where I first came across that trick of a whole scene that actually never happened, that's just part of a character's cover-story. Love 'em both. But then you could argue that both of these cheat, in that they conceal something important about the plot until the end - especially The Usual Suspects, where the whole film is dependent on the twist ending, which is exactly what the complaint is. And yet I'll cheerfully let them get away with it - because, at least in my lexicon, books matter but movies don't. You can be gratuitously clever in a movie, in a way that would infuriate me past bearing on the page. There are people who think I should stop trying to incorporate this attitude into my Theory of Everything, on the grounds that it's clearly just a prejudice; but it does still seem to me to make sense, in an absolutely fundamental way, that I have almost never been able to persuade anyone else to acknowledge. This is my failing, and I live with it.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* well, I'm trying to write a caper *novel* now, so I'll report back when the reviews come in...

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

The Usual Suspects cheats some, but I think it works more than the usual cheats because of the story-within-a-story construction.
In a certain sense, it plays straight with us.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I think the Usual Suspects plays fair, actually, because it's not a caper or a mystery. it's specifically an exploration of an unreliable narrator. Much as Fight Club is.

[sovay]

We're creatures of the underworld. We can't afford to love.

That's a very nice epigraph . . .

[heresluck]

Heh. Am I going to have pull out my "Yes, I see now, but I needed to know this TWENTY PAGES AGO" marginalia? (My students have been keeping me in practice, just so you know.)

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I seem to be having more than a little trouble with relinquishing the idea that the cleverer and more shiny an idea is, the longer the delay should be before it gets explained.

Man did that ever resonate with me, and I'm still working on getting a single project finished. But here in massive rewrite draft #2, I took all those clever ideas I thought would be so neat to reveal slowly througout the story and put them in the first three chapters. My editors, who knew the first version rather well, were whiplashed. But I kept repeating shoot your load, shoot your load, shoot your load like a mantra. Which, admitedly, might make it a much pornier story than the first time around. (I'm kidding about that last part.)

Though I've noticed that my problem revolves around putting the shiny idea way in the past and letting it be revealed slowly rather than having it happen in the NOW and letting the characters and the reader actually experience it. So I keep having to reverse engineer the story.

But still. Much sympathy from me on this point.

[rosefox]

This is making me want to write a story that starts with the revelation of a clever twist.

[vass]

I agree.

Example of head-games with a purpose: Fight-Club.
Example of head-games without a good reason: The Crying Game.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I often find that if I have a clever thing I think will be revealed late, when I sit down and start writing I start revealing it right away, or start setting up for revealing it anwyay. This is, I think, because pacing-of-revelation ought to go at the story's speed, not be under external control. If I try to keep it back for the sake of keeping it back, it's just like those idiot plots that would be resolved on page 3 if the characters actually had a conversation.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Trying to keep secrets does not improve the story.

OH yeah. You can see this crap all OVER my early work.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Clever can't carry you far, unless you're Saki or O. Henry (and notice that they both keep their stories very short)

Saki's When William Came really reads to me as if he were perfectly aware of this but thought the additional elements in it sufficed to support a novel. I am not at all sure he was right, it's a very peculiar thing.

[peartreealley.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I suppose my latest novel narration keeps secrets.

But, even after reading this, and agreeing with much of it, I think I'm still okay with that. Yet, I read a novel a while back that annoyed me, not because the character kept secrets, but because the character kept mentioning those secrets (in the first person) and then kept pulling away. "Oh, but if only they knew what I knew about my father..." *100 pages pass* "Oh, but if only they knew what I had found out..." *100 pages pass* "Oh, but only if..." *100 pages pass* "Blah blah big secret near the end of the story" *irritated and vaguely underwhelmed*

Not sure what that says of me or my story, but I'm okay with that, too :) Maybe I have purpose. Or maybe I'm just misguided. LoL

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Clever can't carry you far, unless you're Saki or O. Henry

OR Somerset Maugham...

Iain M. Banks seems to be good at misdirection though. I say seems because I caught all his plot twists as and when he gave the clues but I know a lot of people who found certain bits in his books [especially _Use of Weapons_ and _Against a Dark Background_] quite shocking.