"Keeping it real" isn't so easy for a writer
25/02/12 11:06 Filed in: Writing
When you're writing a mystery novel, or a court-room drama or anything like it, you want to make sure that the plot, the characters, the individual scenes feel real for the reader. That can mean a lot of things, from making sure your characters are well-rounded and interesting, to planning your plot so that events follow upon each other in a logical, rational way, to working in the details that make each scene real and alive.
You have to try to avoid, for example, creating a character who is too good to be true, lacking in any personal or personality flaw so that she becomes flat and uninteresting. You have to avoid making your villain too purely evil. After all, as Ricardo Montalban once said, evil characters rarely see themselves as evil: they feel they have legitimate reasons to do the evil things they do, that they are justified, even laudable, in their behaviour.
The plot must develop logically, later events developing naturally out of earlier ones. A character's behaviour must be consistent, responding to the events of the novel in a manner that makes sense with their own backstory and previous actions. You can't skip important developments in the story, unless you find some way to circle back to fill in the holes. You want the reader to flow through the plot with you, accepting every event as being a reasonable product of previous occurrences.
And each scene should be meticulously designed and written to be believable. This can be accomplished through the inclusion of small details about people and places that strike the reader as accurate and appropriate and by making sure that the physical actions you describe make sense in the setting in which you have placed them.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
The problem is, being realistic takes a lot of time. And space. If you, as a writer, get so caught up in creating realism that you lose track of the dramatic pace of the story, you're going to lose your reader.
Here's an easy example. In a real-life criminal court room, the closing statement of the prosecuting attorney can often take hours, if not days. The prosecutor carefully reviews all the evidence that has been presented to the court, lays out how that evidence cumulatively satisfies the requirements of the charge and supports a conviction, and, along the way, attempts to address any seemingly contradictory evidence that may have been presented by the defense. It is a slow and meticulous process.
But, to be absolutely honest with you, it's boring. Truly. Yawn-inducingly tedious. That's why television legal dramas cut that closing statement down to 30 pithy seconds. For one thing, it does haven't the time to present the closing argument fully and, secondly, it will lose its audience if it even tries.
Writing a novel is the same. When I have my main character witness a crime, I try to describe what he sees in vivid detail so that it becomes real, alive and hopefully riveting for the reader. But I know that, as soon as the police arrive, my character is going to be expected to describe what he saw, in intense detail, to the investigating cop. And then tell it again. And again. And maybe again. And then he'll have to review a typed copy of his statement and sign it.
In order to make my novel accurate, true to life, these tellings and re-tellings of the incident he witnessed have to take place. Because, in real life, they do.
But, in order to keep the novel moving and make in interesting, I have to find some way to be real without being repetitive and boring.
If I err, I tend to err on the side of too much detail in my writing. I'm still learning how to transition from one scene to "Later that day, after he'd given described what happened in detail for what seemed like the tenth time..."
I have to remember: reality is, quite frankly, boring. It is the job of the writer to shape reality into something more interesting and fast-paced, while still "keeping it real". No easy task, let me tell you.
Today's Photo: The lighthouse on the northern tip of Grand Manan island, New Brunswick.