On not knowing why

Of course you need to know why something happens. One decision gives birth to new circumstances which require another decision, and that's how story grows.

It's obvious enough, but still it hit me with the force of a revelation. Work out what your characters want, make them act to get it, and have the world (the world, that is, of other characters with their own desires) push back.

When I was making notes for my current outline I tried isolating my point of view characters into separate strands. Just as we negotiate the world trapped in our own bodies, no matter how much empathy we have, so I trapped each character in his or her own timeline. I also found that it helped to place the word 'so' between each event. Here's an example from Holly's causal chain:

Holly needs to win her father's approval, and to compensate for a nagging sense that there is no substance to their relationship beyond duty.

She discovers intention to arrest Thomas.
[So]
She risks escape from the city in an attempt to warn him
[So]
She is caught and falls into Kareh's hands
[So]
Faced with his daughter as hostage, Thomas is forced to surrender rather than face down Kareh. Causing the opposite effect to that desired by Holly.

I was pleased with this. It has helped to ground story in the needs of the characters. Before I took this approach there was a danger that the story itself would become a series of tests that robot characters are pre-programmed to traverse, rather like the mindless set-pieces in a Micheal Bay movie. The requirements of the story would overpower its characters.

Still, as with all high-process approaches, there's something reductive about it. For all that I'm privilege my characters, I'm also imagining each of them in the grip of one or two very clear desires, propelled by simple explicable urges. Life is more complicated than this, and so are good stories. People consistently act against their own self-interest -- after all the American public voted for Bush. Twice. We smoke though it kills us, we fall in love with the wrong people, and sabotage ourselves for no good reason. We're a mess.

I have a list of 'what was I thinking' moments. And they strike me at odd times. When I'm driving, or running. I still can't quite fathom the reasons for my stupidity, and how I could have been so absolutely convinced each time that such foolishness was perfectly sensible. Maybe story lives as much in the mystery of that disconnect as it does in the dialectic of need.

This thought is prompted by an essay by Aimee Bender in a collection called The Writer's Notebook (Tin House Books 2009). In Character Motivation she argues that focusing on clear and explicable motivation conjures a closed and predictable system.

“I'd turn in a story in which a character would be behaving a certain way, and other students would want to know why. It makes sense that people would have the desire to know why. We all have a psychological acuit that we've learned from our culture, whether or not we are aware of it – the desire to say “Well this” and plug it into the story. But the thing I worry about when we tack on a reason is that the approach reduces fiction and reduces the human mind. It also demeans the character.”

She's right, isn't she? No question. So where does that leave my neat little causal chains? I don't think that there's anything wrong with mapping out desire, action and reaction. But I also need to be aware that desire is complex, and actions are sometimes mysterious. I should not plan away chaos and confusion. At least not entirely.

As Bender concludes:

“Often writers will rush to an ending that completes, or sums up, or reduces their story as opposed to moving to a place where it goes to something they may not understand and that may be incomplete but is more honest. That rush doesn't do a service to anyone. It doesn't do a service to the work, and it doesn't do a service to the reader. We know that things are complex; we want things to be complex so that, together, we can look deeply into the layers of an open system.”

So from now on every time my characters go rogue, I'll be able to claim that I'm deliberately embracing the mystery of their motivation. And there's an outside chance I may actually be right.

I may return to this essay collection in later posts.