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Maybe if I say it often enough, I'll start to believe it.
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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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.
no subject