Avi

word craft

blog

It’s elementary …

DeerstalkerIf you read mys­tery fic­tion, there is always much about “motive.” Fic­tion­al detec­tives spend much time search­ing for that motive. Some­times it’s easy to for­get that “motive,” is equal­ly impor­tant in non-mys­tery gen­res as well. It helps if you think of the term “log­ic,” rather than motive. When you build your sto­ry (and as a writer of fic­tion, build­ing is what you are doing) you need to estab­lish suf­fi­cient log­ic to enable your read­ers to under­stand, to fol­low why such-and-such hap­pens. Sur­pris­es are great, but to pull the rab­bit out of the hat, so to speak, at some time, you need to put the rab­bit in the hat. Even fan­ta­sy must have its own log­ic and rules.

Just recent­ly, when work­ing on a new nov­el (a real­is­tic nov­el) I real­ized I had not suf­fi­cient­ly estab­lished the log­ic for a key part of the action. This meant I had to go back to the start of the nov­el and rewrite so that the log­ic was embed­ded in the char­ac­ter and the sto­ry right from the begin­ning. Need­less to say, this going back, meant rewrit­ing so that the change became seam­less with all that fol­lowed. In order to do this the writer must look at what he/she has writ­ten as a read­er. It’s my old mot­to com­ing to my res­cue: writ­ers don’t write writ­ing. They write reading.

As a famous (fic­tion­al) detec­tive once said, “It’s ele­men­tary, my dear Watson.”

In fact, it is nev­er ele­men­tary, but it must be clear.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.